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Among the unique features of individual cities, aside from the features that define each place, is the speed with which any city can become at once a singular and global place: a space defined by an indeterminate quality that renders it the only possible place where it is and everywhere else at the same time. A city and the world at once, in an instant, defined by a temporality of place that constitutes the taking place of places. Somewhere, singular and always everywhere, nowhere, the world projected into the universe. Here, I am at the center where I am, wherever I am, and everywhere else: at the center of the world and at its end. Cities are uncanny places whose very familiarity, whose visual and emotional singularity, can induce a sudden and profound disorientation. From the center to the end of where I am at once. Freud speaks of the disorientation one finds at home, the experience of homelessness (unheimlichkeit) one feels only at home; he also proposes the ancient city — its numerous palimpsests and archaeologies — as a model (the only model) for the unconscious. As much as they are geographical, material, and actual, cities are also psychical spaces. They are projections, defined by the heterogeneity of spatial and psychical elements that constitute them. Any city can become the repository of a unique set of projections — fantasies, memories, and imaginary values — that transform it into an atopia, if not a utopia. Most, perhaps all, do. The transformation from a distinct place to an indistinct assemblage of affects is never complete; rather, the shift takes place, in place, as a dynamic variation between the physical and metaphysical values that form each unique place. At once: cities are in the world, but worlds also open inside cities, forcing them (cities) to exceed their geographical and historical specificity (physics) and assume the properties of a world, and even a universe (metaphysics). They are centers and ends of the world. 9 At the Center of the Outside: Japanese Cinema Nowhere Akira Mizuta Lippit 172 Akira Mizuta Lippit The city is a fantastic border that separates this place from the rest of space; a frame that defines the singularity of this place against the universality that surrounds it. This place rather than any other. It is physical to the extent it is finite, but rendered metaphysical by the imaginary qualities its borders enforce. Jacques Derrida invokes the complex economy that binds physical and metaphysical spaces, the earth and world, the totality of the world and the solitude of islands. In his final seminar titled “The Beast and the Sovereign,” Derrida turns increasingly toward the subject of solitude, in particular the solitude of animals and sovereigns, beings marked by a primary relation to the outside.1 To become animal, to become sovereign, is to come into contact with the profound solitude of the outside, to sense the profound solitude of the nonhuman world — to experience the world as a non-human being. Outside the law, outside community, and outside humanity, beasts and sovereigns, among other outsiders, inhabit the outside and come to determine a law of the outside, a community outside. Alone, animals and sovereigns live in the outside, and as figures of it. They are exposed to an outside world, a world outside, a world whose interiority is outside. They are inside-out in the world — in the world by being outside. The world thus framed by the force of exteriority and exclusion transforms the world, the very worldliness of the world, into an island. Reading Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, Derrida speaks in his unfinished lectures of Crusoe’s exile, in particular of the world that had become for the protagonist an island: “There is no world,” says Derrida, “there are only islands.”2 Islands form at the end of the world, beyond or outside the world’s end. The vast expanse of the world, which determines an inclusive form of being and life — a being in the world — has been turned inside out: alone and at a distance from humanity, from others, the outsider is sovereign on an island of one. The totality of worlds has been replaced by the multiple singularities of islands. He says: Between my world, the “my world”; what I call “my world,” and there is no other for me, every other world making up part of it, between my world and every other world, there is initially the space and the time of an infinite difference...

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