ABSTRACT
Foucault’s ‘Of other spaces’ is groundless. Or at least it aspires to be. This is not a critique but a descriptive observation. Like Borges’s ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’, Foucault ‘does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed’ (1970: xviii). This ‘disappearance’ of the ground, of the opposite and opposing site, of a dichotomous categorization, is not coincidental. The other, or difference, as he asserts a few years later, ‘can only be liberated through the invention of an a-categorical thought’ (1977: 186). Yet, as ‘we do not live in a sort of a vacuum’ (Foucault 1997: 351), the ground, like an iceberg under the ship, does surface here and there. The ground is the desert, buried but always threatening to reappear and cover the Persian Garden; it is the floor that is always creaking beneath the carpet; it is the ‘void’ on the maps that the colonies fill up; it is the building, emptied of space and filled by the simulacra; and it is the empty zone at the edge of cities that is taken over by the fair (Foucault 1997).
