Tag: space

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if one considers, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is self-enclosed and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from bank to bank, from brothel to brothel, goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why, from the sixteenth century until the present, the boat has been for our civilization, not only the greatest instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but also the greatest reserve of imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage replaces adventure, and the police the pirates.

–Michel Foucault

Following the sacrifice of the scapegoat, Athens “reconstitutes its unity, closes around the security of its inner courts, gives back to itself the word that links it with itself within the confines of the agora, by violently excluding from its territory the representative of an external threat or aggression. That representative represents the otherness of the evil that comes to affect or infect the inside by unpredictably breaking into it. Yet the representative of the outside is nonetheless constituted, regularly granted its place by the community, chosen, kept, fed, etc., in the very heart of the inside.”

–Derrida, Dissemination, 133.

Vincent Van Gogh , The House in Arles , oil on canvas, 1889 

Nan Goldin, My Defeated Bed , London, 2002 – 5. Lise Sarfati , Sloane # 21 , Oakland, CA, 2007.

Tracey Emin, My Bed 

Sophie Calle, from “Doubles-jeux, Livre V, L’Hôtel”

Josh Greene, Sophie Calle’s Bed