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12 Giving a Face to Place in the Present Bachelard, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Irigaray Everything takes form, even in infinity. -Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics ofSpace Space is everywhere open.... We are in this place. -Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community In tracing out Heidegger's thinking about place and "various phenomenal spatialities " such as region and neighborhood, we have pursued place into some of its more arcane corners and subtler surfaces. We have learned much about the panoply of meanings that place can exhibit as well as the range of roles it can assume in widely divergent contexts. If the effect is kaleidoscopic-leading us to savor place's "free scope," its Zeit-Spiel-Raum-it has allowed us to recognize, indeed to re-recognize, the power of place. Earlier encomia of place (articulated at the moment of its dawning recognition in the West) tend to be terse, as we see in Archytas's fragmentary utterances and Aristotle's condensed lecture notes; or else, at the opposite extreme, they are effusive and panegyrical, as in Iamblichus's and Proclus's dithyrambs. Heidegger chooses a middle path. For him, place is intriguing and valuable, indeed often indispensable, yet not something to be adulated as such. It does not take on the consistently highlighted status of Being or Being-in-the-world, of Truth or Language, the Fourfold or the event of Appropriation. Yet it never becomes merely parasitic on these major terms, nor is it just their by-product or offspring ; it retains its own features and fate, its own local being. The fact .remains, however, that in the course of Heidegger's drawn-out engagement with place, the phenomenon itself all too often slips from view. No ground itself, place goes underground, becoming part of Heidegger's complex polylogue with other thinkers and other concepts. The result, if not the 285 286 The Reappearance of Place intent, is that of interment. Place is caught in the coiling corridors of Heidegger 's labyrinthine lifework. Emerging from these corridors, we are led to ask, is it not time to face place-to confront it, take off its veil, and see its full face? Is it not time to face up to place? Or even to give it a new face, so that we can at last find it, and thus our own ineluctably implaced selves, once again? In and around (and sometimes distinctly athwart) the long shadow cast by Heidegger's imposing work, there are significant signs of a renewed and rising interest in place on the part of philosophically minded authors who think independently of the thinker of Being. The signs are provided by such figures as, in France, Bachelard, Braudel, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Lefebvre, Irigaray, and Nancy; in Germany, Benjamin and Arendt and M. A. C. Otto; and in North America, Relph, Tuan, Entrikin, Soja, Sack, Berry, Snyder, Stegner, Eisenman, Tschumi, and Walter. Each of these figures has succeeded in fashioning a fresh face for place. Common to all of these rediscoverers of the importance of place is a conviction that place itself is no fixed thing: it has no steadfast essence. Where Heidegger still sought something resembling essential traits of place (e.g., gathering, nearing, regioning, thinging), none of the authors I have just named is tempted to undertake anything like a definitive, much less an eidetic, search for the formal structure of place. Instead, each tries to find place at work, part of something ongoing and dynamic, ingredient in something else: in the course of history (Braudel, Foucault), in the natural world (Berry, Snyder), in the political realm (Nancy, Lefebvre), in gender relations and sexual difference (Irigaray), in the productions of poetic imagination (Bachelard, Otto), in" geographic experience and reality (Foucault, Tuan, Soja, Relph, Entrekin), in the sociology of the polis and the city (Benjamin, Arendt, Walter), in nomadism (Deleuze and Guattari), in architecture (Derrida, Eisenman, Tschumi), in religion (Irigaray, Nancy). To read this bare list of names and topics is to become aware of a far-flung and loosely knit family resemblance of changing and contingent traits. This suggests that there is no singular, much less ideal, Place behind so many different (or at least differential) masks. To this extent, the recent history of place may seem all the more hidden, since there is no official story to be told, only a series of significant incidents to be recounted. But in this episodic history, "everything takes form, even in infinity~" Or rather: everything...

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