Notes
Notes Preface: Disappearing Places I. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. K. Smith (New York: Humanities , 1965), A34B50, p. 77. 2. See Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the PlaceWorld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 3. See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, trans. M. Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext [e], 1986), passim. 4. On this interactive aspect of technology, see Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact ofElectronic Media on Social Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). This not to deny that the open networking of television or e-mail, a networking that is potentially endless and numberless, is more akin to space. It is almost as if the ancient dialectic of place and space is being replayed within the domain of technology itself! Moreover, the dromocentrism to which electronic technologies contribute so massively is itself not without placial significance: when life becomes sufficiently accelerated, we find ourselves more, not less, appreciative of the places we are so rapidly passing through. Every race, after all, is a race between someplace we start and someplace we end. 5. See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: AIdine, 1969), chaps. 3 and 4. Jean-Luc Nancy, however, would disagree: "In place of community there is [now] no place, no site, no temple or altar for community. Exposure takes place everywhere, in all places, for it is the exposure of all and of each, in his solitude, to not being alone" (The Inoperative Community, trans. M. Holland [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], 143; his italics). I shall return to Nancy's position briefly at the end of this book. 6. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), passim. 7. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 343 344 Notes to Pages xiv-5 1971), esp. sec. 22, "The Circumstances of Justice." The "objective circumstances" of justice include the fact (cited first of all) that "many individuals coexist together at the same time on a definite geographical territory" (p. 126; my italics). This is so, even though in the "original position" posited by Rawls a "veil of ignorance" is presumed with respect to the "specific contingencies which put men at odds" (p. 136) and which thwart their obligation to "evaluate principles solely on the basis of general considerations " (ibid., 136-137). 8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), 138. Chapter One: Avoiding the Void I. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy ofMorals, trans. F. Golffing, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy ofMorals (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), 299. 2. Whereas the idea of "nonplace"-that is, something merely not a place-does not expunge the possibility of other place-related items such as regions, "no-place" (as I shall abbreviate "no-place-at-all") connotes the radical absence of place of any kind, including cosmic regions. Thus no-place is tantamount to what I shall call "utter void" or "strict void" or "absolute void." 3. The full statement is "Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end" (cited from the Mahapurana, in Primal Myths: Creating the World, ed. Barbara C. Sproul [New York: Harper & Row, 1979], 17, 193). 4. A. K. Coomaraswamy and M. F. Noble, Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists (New York: Dover, 1967),392-395. Chaos (to be considered at greater length in Section II below) figures prominently in the Hindu cosmogony: at the close of each kalpa, or Day of Brahma, the three worlds are resolved into chaos (pralaya), and at the end of one hundred Brahama years, "all planes and all beings ... are resolved into chaos (maha-pralaya, 'great chaos'), enduring for another hundred Brahama-years" (ibid., 393). Notice that in certain traditions creation may be admitted but the role of a creator god is barred. In Taoism, for example, creation is regarded as the spontaneous product of the interaction between heaven and earth: "Creation is the spontaneous work of heaven and earth, repeating itself regularly in every year, or in every revolution of time or the Tao, the order of the universe" (De Groot, The Religion of the Chinese, cited by F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy [New York: Harper, 1957],99). Much as in Hesiod's Theogony, creation proceeds from a primal separation without a distinct creator. At the extreme, both creation and creator are denied. The Jain myth cited just above adds the...
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