Bruno Bosteels, 'Nonplaces - An Anecdoted Topography of Contmeporary French Theory'

117diacritics / fallwinter 2003

NONPLACESAN ANECDOTED TOPOGRAPHY OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH THEORY

BRUNO BOSTEELS

In its juridical sense, a non-lieu is a judgment that suspends, annuls, or withdraws a case without bringing it to trial. It is thus a judgment that an-nounces or enunciates that there will be no judgment as to guilt or innocence, a nding that there is no place to judge. 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, Bance1

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, rst published two decades ago: Perhaps we might say that some of the ideological conicts that animate todays polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and the willful inhabitants of space [Of Other Spaces 22]. This conict 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 modernitys 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, Foucaults work stands as exemplary insofar as he was able to show the degree to which a vital emphasis on space, geography, and ter-

1. In these lines [50], Peggy Kamuf is commenting on a text by Jean-Luc Nancy in which the opening of the mouth is described as follows: This place is not a place and yet it is not outside of all place. It forms within the place, within the extension of a face, the gaping [bance] of a non-place [non-lieu]. In this nonplace, the gure (extension, measure) and the without-gure (thought without measure) are joined and distinguished, joined by their distinction. The place of enunciation [de lnoncer] is formed by the internal dis-location of this reunion [Ego sum 161]. See also Jacques Derrida s similar comments in a text on Maurice Blanchot: La Chose takes place without taking place [a lieu sans avoir lieu]: a non-lieu in the proceedings, a non-lieu at the end of the 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 ctively annuls the very proceedings of indictment, arraignment, detention, and trial [cause], even though the proceedings have taken place; the transcript of them remains, and the certication of the non-lieu) [Living On 13738]. Finally, speaking of anecdotes, the most famous case of a non-lieu related to French theory is of course that of Louis 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 [L avenir dure longtemps 31].

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ritoriality forces us to take leave of the modern paradigm of consciousnesstypically associated with the category of time and its unfolding in the mind or spiritin 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 Hrodote, 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 6970]. 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 nite historical entity, not only does whatever shape critical thought takes in the face of this turnabout need to be securely fastened onto specic 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. Webbers 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, ranging from the misery of refugee camps to the cos-seted luxury of ve-star hotels, some experience of non-place (indissociable from a more or less clear perception of the acceleration of history and the contraction of the planet) is today an essential component of all social exis-tence. Marc Aug, Non-Places (the French original mentions neither refugee camps nor ve-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 Aug. Taking several of his clues by way of a counterpoint from Charles Baudelaires essay The Painter of Modern Life, Aug begins by dening 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 (Augs original term, surmodernit, at least indirectly seems to evoke some of what Georges Bataille had to say in 1968 about the prex sur- in the context of surrealism as much as in the case of Nietzsches 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 fulll and empty out the ideals of modernity, Aug 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 referencethree features the overall result of which would be the emergence of an unprecedented type of nonplace. Aug proposes the following as his working hypothesis: Supermodernity (which stems simultaneously from the three gures of excess: overabundance of events, spatial overabundance and the individualization of references) naturally nds 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 Aug writes, These places have at least three characteristics in common. They want to bepeople want them to beplaces of identity, of relations and of history [52; 69], whereas the exact opposite can be said about the nonplace:

If a place can be dened as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be dened 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, classied, promoted to the status of places of memory, and assigned to a circumscribed and specic position. [78; 100, the reference is to Pierre Noras famous project, Lieux de mmoire]

Thus, the place of post- or supermodernityas a project that is at least nite if not also nishedwould in fact be a nonplace. Nonplaces, however, gure much more prominently in contemporary French thought than even a careful reader would be able to surmise from Augs small contri-bution to what he proposes to call, in contrast to the anthropologists 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 of the 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 Augs reappropriation of the concept of the

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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 deciency; it does not consti-tute a lacuna that must be lled. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

While Aug briey mentions Michel de Certeaus 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 underpinningsredening the eld of history, rst 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 of the Human Sciences, rst published in 1966, the nonplace is rst 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 elds 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 reection, the humanities are literally left without a ground to stand on. Foucaults 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-sciencesmodeled upon ethnology, psychoanalysis, and the study of language and literaturein opposition to the anthropological order that is actually in place. Such critical leverage, nally, 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, Foucaults 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 rst arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shat-tered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thoughtour thought, the thought (that bears the stamp) of our age and our geographybreaking 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, Borgess text is literally said to be the birthplace, or lieu de naissance, of Foucaults book [Les mots et les choses 7]. What nobody seems to have pointed out, though, is the link between this birthplace and the nonplace found at the heart of Borgess 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 gure to the atlas of the 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 [xvixvii; 9]. Borges announces a new and as yet unimaginable episteme beyond the modern one, insofar as he offers us a classication 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 Foucaults key references to the Hispanic world in The Order of Things. The other two, Velzquez 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 gures 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 congurations actually succeed one another. The point is that, if the gure 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 lled by man and his doubles in the modern frame, then Borgess 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 [34043; 35154]. Foucaults 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 of the Prison, a decisive shift takes place which, following Gilles Deleuzes 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 latters 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 Foucaults programmatic 1971 essay Nietzsche, History, Genealogy. One of the aims of this essay, as is well known, is to dene the concepts of a genealogical method as opposed not only to the tradition of humanist intellectual history but also to those postmetaphysical histories of Western thought written in the vein of Martin Heidegger. Thus, to the latters xation 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 dened in terms of a nonplace. In Foucaults words:

As descent qualies the strength or weakness of an instinct and its inscription on a body, emergence designates a place of confrontation but not as a closed eld offering the spectacle of a struggle among equals. Rather, it is a non-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 genealogists 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 events 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 Ren Magrittes 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 Foucaults overall work as a historian and a philosopher. Magrittes 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 gure 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 spacebanal work of art or everyday lessonhas disappeared [2829; Ceci nest pas une pipe 64243]. 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 cofn or a stone instead of a human gure, 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 gures 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 of his own, one that is grammatical rather than verbal-visual: The non-place emerges in personin place of persons and where no one is present any longer [41; 646]. Foucaults 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]. A blank interstitial space, though, not only determines the recipro-cal play between the forms and strata of knowledge that dene 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 erce 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 oor that suggest the space in front of a blackboard in elementary school. What Magrittes verbal-visual pun unravels, in other words, is the entire pedagogical ar-rangement in which a leon de choses (show) is meant to correspond ttingly to a leon 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 conicts 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 et punir 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 gure and the text a whole series of intersectionsor 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 nest 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 Foucaults 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 of the nonplace is quite literally pivotal to Foucaults work. To rely on Deleuzes summary one last time: Between the visible and the sayable, a gap or disjunction opens up, but this disjunction of forms is the placeor non-place, as Foucault puts itwhere 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. modied; 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. modied; 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 (la pense 68) in France, including not only De-leuze but also Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Alain Badiou,

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Jacques Rancire, Michel de Certeau, and Franoise 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 Franois 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 inection given to the concept in Foucaults work. A nal example, drawn from Maurice Blanchots homage to his friend, may suf-ce to illustrate the difcult task of thinking the event in line with Foucaults 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 Foucaults divided loyalty to both philosophy and the social sciences:

Thus, starting with his rst 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. modied; Michel Foucault tel que je limagine 1314]

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 afrms in 1968 in an important interview with members of the Cercle dEpistmologie of the cole Normale Suprieure, editors of the famous journal Ca-hiers pour lanalyse:

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 rst indices of my discourse. I am seeking to disassociate its visible coordinates and shake up its surface immobility. I thus risk raising, in each instant and beneath each of my 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 larchologie des sciences 710; cf. also The Archaeology of Knowledge 1617]

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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 gure 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 reect 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. Foucaults 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 Lvi-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 xed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an innite 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 lled 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 dene the whole task of deconstruc-tion itself in terms of nding 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 Mbius strip. Deconstruction tends to what is neither inside nor outside, what does not take place (na pas lieu), is not an event, or is an

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event (vnement) whose advent (avnement) is to come (-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 systems 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 usoutside of any horizon of expectationsfrom the future. Derridas 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 dene 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 gures that politics, the tradition of the political, or still yet politics according to the regime imposed on it by political philosophy, historically have determined? Grard Bensussan asks in a recent analysis of Derridas nal writings, and he continues: In-deed, conforming with etymology itself, the non-place, the non-locatable, seems to me closely associated with Derridas 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 of the 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. Derridas 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 Derridas 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 dened as structuralists such Lvi-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 redene 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 denes the high pointwhich is also a vanishing pointof 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 a predict-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 of the case of the island as a nonplace for ction, see Simone Pinet s contribution 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 the beginning, there is the placewhere 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 structurean insight that was always already there from the beginning, at the origin of structuralism, albeit insufciently highlighted. In this sense I can only agree with tienne Balibars 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 Balibars 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 specicity of the elementssounds, letters, individuals, and so oncapable of occupying these places. Structuralism cannot be separated from a new transcendental philosophy, in which the sites prevail over whatever lls 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 [26263; A quoi 299]. This topological ambition thus seems to conrm 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

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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, 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; 32223]. 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 of the 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 attened 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 lanalyse, 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 sufce to bring to light, it is not an inability of the word nor a ruse of the author. It is the silence, the defect that organizes the stated word, it is the retracted place [le lieu drob] that could not be illuminated because it is on the basis of its 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 t 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:

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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 contradictory allure, which sticks out or is off-level; the element that masks it now signals, by a certain bend of its conguration, 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 of the 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 of its 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-cic 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 insufcient move. In his 1967 review of Louis Althussers 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 specic ex-clusion, the pertinent lack, i.e., the determination or structurality of the structure, Badiou says of the task of a structuralist analysis which many critics today would rather associate with poststructuralism. Referring not only to Lvi-Strauss but also to another of Millers texts in Cahiers pour lanalyse, La suture: lments de la logique du sig-niant from 1966, he sums up much of this argument:

The fundamental problem of all structuralism is that of the term with the dou-ble function, inasmuch as it determines the belonging of all other terms to the structure, while itself being excluded from it by the specic operation through which it gures in the structure only under the guise of its placeholder (its lieu-tenant, to use a concept from Lacan). It is Lvi-Strauss s enormous merit, in the still-mixed form of the zero signier, to have recognized the true impor-tance of this 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 Thorie 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.

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Based on the play between esplace and horlieu, Badious Thorie du sujet further-more distinguishes between a structural and a dialectical logic. The rst, which would be exemplied not only in the psychoanalytical work of Lacan but also in the poetry of Mallarm even if, as I would guess, the implied addressee is actually Althusser, serves to map out a given order of things according to the specicity and relative autonomy of various places, levels, or instancesall 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 of the afrmative 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 Thorie 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 of the 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 Thorie du sujet an-ticipates much of what would eventually come to be dened as the site of an event in Badious Ltre et lvnement [cf. Sites vnementiels et situations historiques 19398] 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 of May 1968

The place of the political subject is an interval or a ssure: a being-together as being-in-between: between names, identities, or cultures. Jacques Rancire, Aux bords du politique

Rather than continue to dene 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 specic 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 rst insisting that in both cases 1968 truly stands as a watershed year. Thus, in the realm of art beyond the connes 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 Dubuffets 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 of the May 68 revolt in France, we could study the literary uses of the nonplace, from Foucaults own study of Raymond Roussel to Derridas 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, Obergker, and Ouellet]. My nal comments, though, will be restricted to matters of practice pertaining to politics and, to a lesser extent, to ethics. Michel de Certeaus 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 nally amounts to the same thing, causes to be grasped) that which resists both a mental order and a social order, namely, the events? [4344; La prise de parole 80]. In Certeaus 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 ssure in the midst of the existing order of representation, in both the linguistic and the political senses of the term. Highly reminiscent of Foucaults 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 rst 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 gure of the 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 910, trans. modi-ed; Prise 38]

Two aspects are worth stressing in this analysis. The rst 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 reshufe 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

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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 forcesthe students and workers joined on the barricadesto 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 Rancire would elaborate a similar interplay between the nonplace and the new place into a model for understanding the logic of political invention. For Ran-cire, in fact, all political acts consist in inventing arguments and statementsno mat-ter how absurd they may well appear from the point of view of conventional standards of logicwith 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 sisters, at the time of the Republic, ask the question, Are Frenchwomen included in the Frenchmen who hold universal suffrage?, 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 [ils ne concluent nullement de l au non-lieu du texte galitaire]. 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 msentente 12728]

Like Certeau and Foucault before him, Rancire 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 nd 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 Rancire 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, cart], or a groundless claim [non-lieu], it transforms it into its oppo-siteinto the grounds for a claim [un lieu], into a space open to dispute [un espace polmique]. The stating of equality is thus not nothing. A statement has the power we give it. This power is in the rst 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 veriable. Here is the basis for a practice that sets itself the task of verifying this equality. [On the Shores of Politics 47, trans. corrected; Aux bords du politique 65]

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

Textual Pleasure and the Other s Demand

The task is to conceive of the possibility of a break out of essence. To go where? To stay on what ontological plane? But the extraction [arrachement] from essence contests the unconditional privilege of the question where?; it signies a null-site [non-lieu]. Emmanuel Lvinas, Otherwise than Being

Even if, in the years immediately following the main period under consideration in this limited survey, the nonplace no longer nds 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 relationwhether to the literary text or to the place of the other facing ones self. Thus, in The Pleasure of the Text, rst 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 denition escape all assigned places. A ruthless 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 con-sumption than at least in its production [29; 49]. Textuality takes place in a no-mans-land, a neutral zone foreign to all topological xations. 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 Lvi-Strauss to Deleuze to Badiou, dene the structuralist or poststructuralist obsession with mana, the empty square, the zero degree, and so on, Barthes thus explicitly denes the place of the writer as hors-lieu, or outside-of-place:

As a creature of language, the writer is always caught up in the war of ctions (jargons), but he is never anything but a plaything 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 dubious from its origin. The writer is always on the blind spot of systems, adrift; he is the joker in the pack, a mana, a zero degree, the dummy in the bridge game: necessary to the meaning (the battle), but himself deprived of xed meaning; his place, his (exchange) value, varies according to the movements of history, the tactical blows of the struggle: he is asked all and/or nothing. [Pleasure 3435; Plaisir 57]

One year later, nally, it is Emmanuel Lvinas who denes the nonplace as the place of the ethical, in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. In Lvinass by now

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widely known understanding, this ethical dimension derives from the absolute claim the other has upon meprior even to my being able to identify myself as an indepen-dent and self-reliant human being. Faced with such an impossible and innite demand, I am necessarily pulled away from the comfort of familiar identications and mandates. Before identity and beneath or beyond essence, the subjects responsibility toward the other is a responsibility to-ward ones 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 [lirrductible cart qui be] here between the non-presence and every representable divergency, which in its own waya way to be clariedmakes a sign to the responsible one. [Otherwise than Being 1011; Autrement qutre 2425]

In fact, already in 1972, in Humanism of the Other, Lvinas had succinctly an-ticipated this idea: The otherness of the fellow man is this hollow of no-place where, face, he already takes leave [sabsente], without promise of return and resurrection [7; Humanisme de lautre 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 rapportor of a responsible substitutionbetween self and other: The oneself [soi-mme] is on this side of the zero of inertia and nothingness, in decit 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 195n12; Autrement 172n2]. Despite the subtlety of Lvinass famous phenomenological readings of the face, of the bodys 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 reection, Lvinas discusses as pedestrian an environment as the Parisian caf, his tone rather quickly and surprisingly turns deprecatory:

The caf holds open house, at street level. It is a place of casual 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 of our incapacity to stay alone in our room. The caf 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 difculty there is in ar-

3. Simon Critchley, in a recent article, comments on and nally rejects the peculiarity of Lvinas s description of the caf as a nonplace:

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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 caf-bistro. Even the juxtaposition of such heterogeneous places makes the difculty 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 Aug.

Epilogue: Politics in Times of Nihilism

The stumbling block to the coexistence of places and non-places will always be political. Marc Aug, Non-Places

Compared to the vast role of the nonplace in French theory and philosophy since the late 1960s, we can now see that Augs 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, Aug 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 ofcial 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. modied; Linvention du quotidien 15859]. For Aug, however, nonplaces mean the exact opposite. Certain places exist only through

This is an extremely odd and wrongheaded passage. Levinas describes the caf 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 Pascals 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 caf is as good a (non)place as any to experience such a claim. On the contrary, rather than seeing the caf or pub as a place of wanton irresponsibility, I see the space of the pub as a space of responsibility, of solidarity, even of resistance to the commodifying forces that threaten to devour the life-world. [00]

Other critics, such as Bettina Bergo and Charmaine Coyle, also attack Lvinas s political weak-nesses by drawing negatively on the concept of the nonplace.

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the words that evoke them, and in this sense they are non-places, or rather, imaginary places: banal utopias, clichs, he observes: They are the opposite of Michel de Cer-teaus 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 Augs 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 signicance for Aug? Not quite, as the question of politics by the end of the book turns out to be a ma-jor stumbling block. Aug, as a matter of fact, ends his reections 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 of the 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 mentioninglong before 9/11 in the USAan international ight that crosses Saudi Arabia: What is signicant 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 Augs 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 pregures the ideal of all democracy [In the Metro 66; Un ethnologue dans le mtro 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, Augs 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 afrmative power of events in French theory, philosophy, and the critique of anthropologism.

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Bruno Bosteels, 'Nonplaces - An Anecdoted Topography of Contmeporary French Theory'

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