"Territory & Thought"

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1995

in: Radical Philosophy. A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Philosophy, No. 169, September/October 2011, 13-16.

Professor Rajul Bhargava Editor Voices vi • Acknowledgements Editor's Note Mirror, mirror on the wall Who is it that you see? Is it 'I' or 'me' or you? Who am 'I'? A part of 'Us' or 'Them'? Similar, Different, Other? '… we are our own foreigners, we are divided' said Jndia Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves. Across all levels of various societies, not only now but down history, there has been a tension to include some and exclude others, a tension between sameness and otherness, be it due to colour, creed, caste, class, gender, religion, migration ….. So who is this 'Other' and who has the power to define, to decide who he is, for what purposes and under which sociocultural conditions? Isn't this growing 'othering' based on asymmetric power relations which create binary oppositions between the privileged and non-privileged, the 'sovereign subject' and the 'constitutive other'? Indeed, underlying such discriminations is 'the basic category of human thought which instantly posits an opposite when we think about what 'is' (Simone de Beauvoir). It was Emmanuel Levinas who believed that otherness/alterity should make us realize that there is a vast universe of mystry outside 'I', 'you', 'we', 'us'-something to fill us with awe, care and concern rather than casting stigmatizing categories of 'they' and 'them'. Had not Nietzsche in his Thus, Spake Zarathustra, analysing the many kinds of our relation with the 'other', said that the 'Overman' cannot but visualize his journey to Earth without the other-who becomes a catalyst of transformation? Playing on the role of the 'other', Nietzsche analysed that we reconstitute ourselves throughout our lives as another, our self-overcoming is therapeutic therefore how could 'othering' be an antagonism? The Heideggerian dasein too consists of a multiplicity of drives to become all that he comes to be-the 'other' incorporated. 'Othering' goes far beyond scapegoating and denigrating. The Greeks dis-including the rest besides themselves called them 'barbarians'; Columbus landing in the New World 'othered' the indigenous inhabitants-thus immense civilizations were despoiled, desecrated and destroyed forever. In more recent history the Imperial powers created the 'othered' Third World, creating differences of subalternity, liminality and alterity, and even within these there were further dissections arising out of 'narcissism of minor differences' (Freud); and then, ofcourse, 'self' othering where, according to Lacan, one can experience oneself as a stranger, the 'other' within as Hobbes had said 'a human is a wolf to a fellow other'. Levinas again in Tolality and Infinity had worked on the binaries of exteriority and interiority, on essence and dissonance, on semblance and resemblance. Hegal as well attested to the duality of perception where the 'subject' is the being and 'object' the other. Derridian 'inclusivity' and 'exclusively' principle affirms Levinas' binary. In a telling essay 'Psyche: Inventions of the Other' Derrida seems to conclude that whereas invention of the same is a homogeneous calculation, deconstruction is the invention of the 'other', which is different and also constantly gets deferred. Otherness/Othering today is a discourse of exclusion, of discrimination which projects tensions between dichotonomons identities, their relationality and postionality being governed by the spatio-temporal power dynamics which are in a continuous flux. Difference is in the realm of fact and 'otherness' in the realm of discourse. 'Otherness' is a part of the catastrophology of our times. We are constantly menaced by the magnified, augmented 'otherness', sometimes concrete but more often than not fantastic, surrealistic, which might perhaps be our Armageddon. Let us, beware of this shadow of a shadow, 'a dark chthonic figure 'the Luciferan element' (Jung). There are no strangers, no 'others'-only various versions of ourselves-unacknowledged, unembraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from and in this battle inclusively and belonging are at stake. The myriad voices collected in this issue take up this need-of-the-hour polemics and deconstruct this complex, multivalent issue.

2013

This chapter is about limits and impossibilities. It is written from the margins of two equally constraining positivities that cannot willingly be transcended, nor perhaps even be fully embraced-the tragic position of those who inhabit that unmapped space where epistemes clash without ever meeting. An in-between that collapses, as a totality, all the disjunctions of the Same and the Other into the distorted consciousness of a One. A space where two worlds, two languages, two memories see, speak and fight past each other, their respective limits and impossibilities converging in a common point where they are both annihilated, where Foucault's sense of wonder is doubled on both sidesa limit of two thoughts, a dual impossibility of thought. As a result, no conceptual or linguistic apparatus is perfectly suited for thinking and writing the words that follow. And perhaps the whole attempt at creating a discursive space that by definition cannot grasp what lies beyond it is simply futile. The reader's untamed instinct for epistemic chaos is therefore required to sustain the text beyond its necessary silences. … the laughter that shattered, 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 "Ce qui est impossible, ce n'est pas le voisinage des choses, c'est le site même où elles pourraient voisiner." (Foucault 1966: 8) Am I distorted, or are you? Which of us desires oneness, and which abhors it? Why do you see tragic where I see the light of my resistance, against you and those you have let in-between us?

We develop two issues: 1. a territorial assemblage is a narrative which orga-nizes in a complex hypernetwork (Johnson) heterogeneous elements (charac-ters, contexts, plots, tools, discourses…) 2. as a new kind of artifact, it is then necessary to imagine a political mode of “being together” in a world-like-assemblages. A territory, a city, an area are, literally, a “story being do-ne”, it is an ongoing process, a performative (Austin). And as Mac Intyres affirms it (After the virtue, 1981), “the stories must be lived before being told”. The narrative is then the making of the territory. We propose then five models of the being together in this assemblage: an apolitical mode of inno-vation (Bergson, Deleuze, Serres), a mode of recognition (Honneth), a mode of self-organisation (Guattari, Negri), a cybernetic mode (Smart City) and a mode of diplomacy (Latour).

What does a notion of capitalization do to our understandings of late capitalism and the city? What can our renewed interest in materiality add to postcolonial thought and the study of colonial history? And how do we parse through the wreckage of our age of revolts? When we find the political grammar that might respond to our present, what will we make of the square and occupations, or disruption and infrastructure in our theories of political action? These are some of the questions that are taken up in this wide-ranging interview with Timothy Mitchell; an interview in which Mitchell, reflecting on past projects and elaborating current research, offers us substantive insights into the thought processes that have made his work so indispensable.

Aibr-revista De Antropologia Iberoamericana, 2016

Parrhesia: A Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2019

Philosophy has often taken itself to be distinguished from and superior to alternative ways of thinking. To do so, philosophical thinking has found itself rigidly affirming the need to think within borders to obtain conceptual clarity and certainty and/or secure its own independent existence. The chapters in this volume call into question the need to retreat behind demarcated boundaries that mark the domain of philosophy proper, to instead offer a performative account of how philosophy can creatively work across (geographical, cultural, linguistic) borders, without foreclosing that analysis conceptually. In so doing, the contributors tackle issues including the historical establishment of philosophical borders, the metaphysics of philosophical borders, the relationship between Western and non-Western thinking, the ethics of transgressing borders, and the political implications of Western rationality on and for non-Western societies. Philosophy Across Borders will therefore be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, aesthetics, critical theory, comparative philosophy, cultural studies, feminist theory, history of ideas, political theory, and postcolonial studies. Table of Contents Introduction: Philosophy Across Borders Emma Ingala and Gavin Rae (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain) Part I: Critique 1. Beyond Hope: The Borders Between Theoretical and Practical Philosophy Morganna Lambeth (California State University: Fullerton, USA) 2. The Metaphysics Beneath a Limit: Criticism from Contemporary Liminal Theory Gonzalo Núñez Erices (Universidad Católica del Maule, Chile) 3. Philosophy without Borders, or the Permanence of Questioning Tamara Caraus (University of Lisbon, Portugal) Part II: Crossing Cultures 4. Thinking “Orientally”: Nietzsche and Indian Philosophy Emma Syea (King’s College London, England) 5. Adorno and the Work of the Spirit: Modernism in Aesthetic Terms William D. Melaney (American University in Cairo, Egypt) Part III: Ethics 6. Against the Intolerable: On Limits, Boundaries, and Transgression Guilel Treiber (Radboud University Nijmegen, Holland) 7. Foucault, Feminism, and the Limits of Experience Liesbeth Schoonheim (Humboldt University, Germany) 8. Where are we when we think from within the Body? Adriana Zaharijević (University of Belgrade, Serbia) Part IV: Politics 9. No Accounting for Taste: Aesthesis on the Borders of Philosophy Cillian Ó Fathaigh (Jagiellonian University, Poland) 10. Crossing Lines between Deleuze and Négritude: A Vitalist Ontology of Post-colonial War Machines Sara Raimondi (Northeastern University London, England) and Hannah Richter (University of Sussex, England)

2018

It is not unusual to consider a discipline spatially as a "space defined or touched by a particular characteristic or force" (Wardle and Downs, this collection, emphasis added). This conceptualization makes visible the metaphor at play here: territories are demarcated and differentiated from neighboring environments by borders that can be more or less visible. In this chapter, we use our experience as faculty members invested in a substantive revision of an MA program revision to explore how that process of delineation opens up new questions about disciplinarity. We sought to create a generous curricular space within an MA degree, one that accounted for our own disciplinary expertise, the needs and interests of our students, and the vision of our university. As we did so, we were also constructing a curricular map of what Rhetoric and Composition looks like in the "locus of situated, locally responsive, socially productive, problem-oriented knowledge production" that MA-granting institutions might provide (Vandenberg and Clary-Lemon 2010, 258). 1 Like critical cartographers, we grew to recognize the rhetorical power of curricular, historical, personal, and pedagogical maps, all of which surfaced as we moved through this process. We realized throughout the revision process that our represen Wations of "the" discipline-the program we wanted to revise, the program we were building, our oZn educational experiences-were rooted in narratives. Like geographer Denis Wood (2010), we began to understand the connection between mapping and narrative, and we started to envision mapping processes as a form of storytelling. 2 We also grew to realize that our own experiences are always necessarily representational and situated, just as Peter Turchi (2004) asserts that maps cannot be neatly