The city and the philosopher: on the urbanism of phenomenology

PHILOSOPHY & GEOGRAPHY, VOL. 4, NO. 2, 2001 ARTICLE The city and the philosopher: on the urbanism of phenomenology EDUARDO MENDIETA Department of Philosophy, University of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA Abstract Philosophy projects a certain understanding of reason that is related to the ways in which the city Žgures in its imaginary. Conversely, the city is a practice of spatialization that determines the ways in which agents are able, or unable, to live out their social agency. This essay focuses on the ways in which philosophy and the city’s spatializing practices and imaginaries inform differential ways of living out social agency. The thrust of the investigation is to discern the ways in which sexism—differential engendering—results from the relationship that exists between philosophy and the city. To illustrate this link between philosophy, the city, and differential engendering, the work turns to a consideration of Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology, which is taken as an exemplary illustration of the entwinement between the philosophical imaginary, and the perception and reception of the city. Introduction The history of philosophy can be, and has been, written as the history of philosophical systems, currents, schools, great philosophers, even as the story of the succession of geopolitically hegemonic empires.1 A history of philosophy as the history of its sites of production, however, has yet to be undertaken.2 Why this project has not been undertaken is certainly related to the fundamental prejudice that orients most, if not all, philosophy. This prejudice assumes that philosophy is about thinking the absolute, the universal, in a way that transcends, effaces and erases the traces of the origin and site from which or out of which such thinking is thought. Philosophy, to use an expression of Merleau-Ponty, does not project a shadow, because it is no where. Another reason why the archeology of the sites of the production of philosophy has yet to be undertaken is related to the prima facie plurality of such sites. One may in grosso modo suggest the following parallels: Greek philosophy to Agora, Roman philosophy to Imperial City, Christian philosophy to Monastery and/or Church, Modern philosophy to European urban centers of mercantile, colonialist, and later, imperialist capitalism, and so on. There is a way in which if we think of philosophy as a practice, the practice of thought, this practice must have been and continues to be determined by the place in which and out of which it is practiced. And in this realization there lies perhaps the most fundamental reason why the archeology of the sites of the production of philosophy has ISSN 1090-3771 print/ISSN 1472-7242 online/01/020203-16 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/10903770120067043 204 E. MENDIETA not been undertaken. The links between thought and place, thinking and space, remain elusive, if not mutually exclusionary. To think is to be where one is not, and to be, in body and soul, is to focus on the moment, on what is present at hand. Yet, thinking is conditioned by space, just as how a space, a place, in turn, is made accessible by a way of thinking.3 This paper is about how philosophy thinks, images, and projects space, thus contributing to the consolidation, legitimation, and normalization of certain spatial practices. At the same time, it is also about how certain social practices, once solidiŽed and coagulated into topographies and geographies that map social relations, in turn condition the ways space is to be represented, experienced, and lived, i.e., to be thought by philosophy. The central claim of this essay is that philosophy has been most fundamentally determined by the city, and conversely, that the city is related to the project, or production, of philosophy. In the Žrst part of the essay, I combine the insights of Lefebvre and Appadurai in order to develop a method of analysis that will render the internal relations between philosophizing and the city evident and graspable. This method I call chronotopology, or the study of spatial-temporal regimes. Here, however, I want to focus on the elements that such a method entail.4 Thus, this essay is not an exercise in either reconstruction or exegesis. It has a generative telos, namely to offer insight into those tools, or categories of analysis, that we would have to take into account were we to develop a comprehensive analysis of the co-determination of the city, as perhaps the paramount, although not only, locus of the actualization of space, and philosophy.5 Chronotopology would be the method. Lefebvre and Appadurai would be two precursors. The central thesis that this essay seeks to illustrate and defend is that the city as a site in which one may Žnd the traces of practices, representations, and experiences of space is inescapably a product of the philosophical imaginary. Philosophy thinks the city, be it in the form of an image, a utopia, even a conceptual grid. At the same time, however, precisely because the city is the site of the sedimentation of practices, representations, and lived experiences, it enacts a particular philosophical imaginary. Philosophy is enabled as a practice of the imagination but also of the body itself (philosophers have homes and sometimes they walk or drive to their places of teaching) by the city. One may even say that the city imagines/images philosophy. The second half of the essay turns to a case study of Jean-Paul Sartre. Again, the idea is not to develop a comprehensive analysis of Sartre’s concept of space. Nor is it to illustrate how Sartre changes his ideas about space as he progresses from phenomenology to Marxism.6 Rather, the point is to illustrate how Sartre’s phenomenological investigations exhibit the kind of co-determination that exist between philosophy and the city. Many other philosophers would have been equally appropriate as litmus tests. Heidegger comes to mind immediately, but also Plato and his Academy, and Aristotle, whose school was called the peripatetics, because they used to walk around while philosophizing.7 By the same token, if the general approach of this paper is to be credible at all, we should be able to Žnd correlations between cities and philosophers, if not entire philosophical systems, not just in the 20th century, or at the so-called dawn of Western philosophy, but throughout its entire history.8 The philosophizing of the city In order to approach the question of the relationship between the city and philosophy, I will avail myself of the framework developed by Henri Lefebvre. I will complement his framework with Arjun Appadurai’s work on the imagination in the age of globalization, THE CITY AND THE PHILOSOPHER 205 which I think is pertinent to the discussion of spatialization and philosophy’s relationship to the practices and technologies of embodiment that are allowed and called for by the city. I think that this synthesis of Lefebvre with Appadurai allows a discussion of the political economy of the production of space that, hopefully, will neither slide back into Marxist economism and ideological reductivism, nor, just as importantly, simply regurgitate Eurocentric spatialities. In order to be able to explicate how space is produced, in a non-reductivist way, Henri Lefebvre distinguishes between: spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces. Every social system is legitimated through an ideology. This ideology is “primarily a discourse upon social space.”9 This discourse upon social space, however, must be differentiated in terms of the practices that undergird it and produce it, the way it is actually projected as an idea or image, and how it is lived. Ideology, after all, is a matter of lived experience. Thus, for Lefebvre, to disentangle the ideology of a particular system requires that we discern the ways in which the spatial practices of a social system “secretes that society’s space.”10 Spatial practices consist of, for instance, the processes of contemporary gentriŽcation that displace some through the valorization of certain spaces; the localization of educational institutions within certain neighborhoods which are also within the reach of sport, transportation, and scientiŽc training facilities; the gentriŽcation of areas through access to loans and mortgages that results in ghettoization, the displacement and emplacement of spaces of production either far away or very close to spaces of living, which might not stand close to places of mass public transportation. But spatial practices, and here I am expanding on Lefebvre, also consist in the constitution of what I would like to call lustscapes or pornscapes that match the consumptionscapes that gentrify civic agents.11 These, in turn, are also to be differentiated from powerscapes, and entertainmentscapes (or to mutate Benjamin Barber’s term, infotainmentscapes12) that further map the city. Red zone districts, like ghettos of power and powerless, mark bodies by marking zones for the consumption and production of desire, the abjection and policing of the other.13 Spatial practices are not by any means driven solely by economic imperatives. They are driven by the imaginary of power, and by the power of the imagination. The monumentality of a Paris, Rome, or New York are all defaced, challenged, and contested by the grafŽti of the people, the murals that give voice to the power of the city, and the contestation of civic space through loitering, walking, festivals and commemorations.14 Indeed, cities are sites of struggle between classes, ethnicities, and genders. Cities, in turn, are gatherings of places which are memories of wars and battles, conicts and victories. Cities are also the testament, if not the bequest, of both real and metaphorical struggles between cities that stood or stand now for certain ideas, ideologies, or imaginaries: Athens versus Jerusalem, Paris versus Berlin, Washington versus Moscow, etc.15 Two different and famous but illustrative examples of the ways in which a society’s spatial practices secretes that society’s space are Los Angeles and New York. The former is a city of distances to be broached by cars and highways. The latter is a city of closeness in the midst of a concrete, steel, and Žberoptics jungle. The former is linked by a network of asphalt and cement, the latter by its famous subway system. Their daily and ceaseless ows of peoples through its arteries is the most highly obvious way in which a city’s spatial practices condition civic agents. One reaches horizontally, the other vertically. Both claim, gather, produce, and secrete space differently. Both, however, are but different versions of the same quest for the eternal West, the eternal frontier.16 Every spatial practice is accompanied by its representations of space. There is no 206 E. MENDIETA absolute space, except as a representation of an abstracted, reiŽed social space. These representations are generally produced by “scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers” by identifying “what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived.”17 Absolute, abstract space is function of a particular way of representing space that corresponds to the rise of mercantilism, capitalism, and the centrality of the city as a site for the exchange of commodities, and the quantiŽcation of all interchange. The classic examples of representations of space are the development of perspective in painting by the Renaissance painters, which was catalyzed by the new role of cities in Western societies, and the development of non-Euclidian geometries at the turn of the century, which might have been catalyzed by the de-centering of Europe. These are arguments that require sustained and careful illustration, one which is beyond the scope of this circumscribed space. Still, Lefebvre devotes a sizeable part of his book The Production of Space to substantiating these claims.18 Representations of space and spatial practices determine the coordinates within which social agents live their space. Spatial practices, as Lefebvre puts it, secrete a society’s space.19 When this secretion converges or dialectically interacts with the representations of space produced by society’s engineers and technocracts, it also enters into dialectical tension with the lived space of agents. This lived space is what Lefebvre calls representational spaces. These spaces are “directly lived through [their] association with images and symbols.”20 These are the space of inhabitants and users, but also of artists and perhaps even philosophers who “aspire” to do more than merely describe.21 It is from such representational spaces that subjects are emplaced and embodied as social agents. It is from these representational spaces that agents peer outward to the civic landscape, and inward to their psychic life. A representational space always acts as a horizon from which we are allowed to or prevented from surveying our localization in social space.22 The inside of the body, and the outside of the mind, to paraphrase a wonderful formulation of Elizabeth Grosz, are circumscribed by these spaces.23 In other words, how the look from outside towards the inside, and conversely, from inside towards the supposedly legible surface of the body, condition each other is determined by these representational spaces. Sexism, as well as racism, are functions of the representational spaces that allow or disallow one to occupy one’s own body, and one’s civic space.24 Sexism denies one access to a representational space of one’s body that is free from the colonizing gaze of another.25 Sexism constitutes those representational spaces that condition the ways in which one is able to localize one’s body in social space.26 The same holds for racism. Frantz Fanon’s famous discussion of racism is easily translatable into the language of the spatializing that is allowed by representational spaces, that is, racism is Žnding oneself in a world in which no space is one’s own, and all spaces are commandeered by a supreme master race.27 To be black, like being female, means not being allowed, and not being able to think oneself, in certain spaces, or places, at certain times, or hours of the night (or day, depending). For Lefebvre, spatial practices, representations of space, and representational spaces stand in direct relation to the dialectical triad: the perceived, the conceived, and the lived. A spatial practiced is perceived, a representation of space is what is conceived, and a representational space is what is lived. The point of this analytical model, however, is not to establish a formal schematic, but rather to grant us the tools to ascend to the most concrete forms of the historical production of space. One might therefore say that an archeology of subjectivity can be pursued through an archeology of the production of space.28 How a social agent lives, conceives, and perceives their social existence is related to the spatial practices, the representations of space, and THE CITY AND THE PHILOSOPHER 207 the representational spaces that together offer us a cartography of a particular society.29 In order to establish better the links I want to elucidate between philosophy, the city, and differential gendering embodiments, I would like to synthesize Lefebvre’s analysis of the production of space with Arjun Appadurai’s discussion of the imaginary. I turn to him for two reasons. First, because I read his work as an attempt to theorize the positive dimensions of ideology, that is, I read his work as an illustration of how control, hegemony, and in tandem, resistance and contestation, are not just a negative operation but also a positive production. In other words, his work illustrates how ideology produces images, and excites the imagination, thus controlling the imaginary. Ideology does not just obfuscate, conceal, and mask, it also makes us see in certain ways, or allows us only to see what we can see when we are looking at it. Ideology controls by allowing and disallowing what is imaginable and unthinkable, and to this extent, it is not just negative, or constraining, it is also positive and creative. I think that this aspect of Appadurai’s work can serve as a corrective to some elements of Lefebvre’s work that may sound too deterministic. The second reason why I turn to Appadurai is because I Žnd that most contemporary discussions of postcolonial issues and of globalization seem to be proceeding as if globalization and postcoloniality happen somewhere else on the map. Someone else is postcolonial, just as someone else is the victim of globalization. Appadurai’s work contests this unilateral and anatropic perspective. For Appaduari, who develops his discussion explicitly from within the context of a confrontation between postcolonial and globalization theories, what distinguishes globalization, or our contemporary life, is the new role imagination has attained not just in relationship to some putative center, but to the entire planet. I Žnd this sensibility and approach to be not just apropos, but also theoretically necessary. It helps correct the Eurocentric or North Atlantic focus of Lefebvre’s political economy of the production of space. In order to grasp the new role of the imagination in global society, Appadurai brings together three approaches: that of the Frankfurt school with its focus on images, especially those that have been mechanically produced and reproduced; that of social historians informed by Benedict Anderson’s idea of the imagined community; and that of French social thought that focuses on the idea of the imaginary (Lacan, et. al). Together, these approaches allow us to bring together the image, the imagined, and the imaginary. In synergy, they allow us to discern the dialectic of the new global cultural process, which in Appadurai’s terms signals the recognition of imagination as social practice. Globalization, thus, could be understood as the new cultural process in which the imagination has become an organized Želd of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally deŽned Želds of possibility … The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order.30 I want to suggest that there is a relationship between Lefebvre’s spatial practices, representations of space, representational spaces, and Appadurai’s image, the imagined, and the imaginary. A spatial practice is always perceived as an image, as in the image of a cityscape, the sky-line of a city, the congested highways extending and vanishing in the horizon, the monstrous snakes of people being vomited from the entrails of the city, etc. A representation of space is always an imagined space. We project from an image of what is perceived, an ideal, extreme, clariŽed imaged. The empty space of science, the 208 E. MENDIETA absolute space of mathematics, and the abstract space of transcendental reection all reect the empty space of the city square, the space of power that the state occupies, and the space of sociality that civic participation both represents and requires. Finally, a representational space is to lived space what the imaginary is to the images and imagination that we develop from a given social space. The social imaginary is conditioned by the images and imagination allowed or not by speciŽc, historically produced spatial arrangements. Agents are able to conceive of themselves as either enabled or proscribed from engaging in certain praxes depending on the representational spaces that accompany a social imaginary. One must wonder, for instance, why one almost never sees a woman in a red light district as a consumer, but always as a commodity of consumption. Where in social space is the space reserved for the production and consumption of women’s desire? This question need not entail a justiŽcation of either pornography or prostitution. It questions a seemingly objective fact and points to the way in which the feminine imaginary is circumscribed or excluded from certain incursions and is thus relegated to certain stealth acts of trespassing. With these prolegomena, I have prepared the territory for the following arguments. Philosophy thinks the city, as the city imagines philosophy. Philosophy, in other words, emerges from a spatial practice that conditions and is conditioned by particular representations of space and representational space. Philosophy is always the work of an image of the city, the imagination of the city, and the social imaginary of a demos. Conversely, the city is produced by philosophy insofar as philosophy offers an imagine of the city, calls for a particular urban imagination, and determines the frontiers of a social imaginary that either excludes or includes the city as its locus. To illustrate the co-determination of image, imagination, and the imaginary, as correlatives of a spatial practice, a representation of space, and a representational space, I would like to turn to a contra-punctual reading of Sartre. Through an analysis of Sartre’s phenomenological writings, I hope to make patent the ways in which his philosophical project is parasitic on the city and philosophy’s long-standing relationship to it. At the same time, barely submerged under his verbiage of ontological and phenomenological philosophizing operates a determining and continuous differential gendering. The Pour-Soi is ineluctably and uncircumventably emplaced, true. Sartre’s being-in-the-world, however, is always a gendering emplacement. How space is produced by philosophy, and how philosophy is produced by a certain social space, but how both are gendering, is what I hope to illustrate next.31 The look of the city and looking in the city: Jean-Paul Sartre Simone de Beauvoir once characterized Jean-Paul Sartre as someone who abhors—the word isn’t too strong—the seething life of insects and the profusion of plants … he feels at home only in towns, at the heart of an artiŽcial universe consisting of man-made objects. He likes neither raw vegetables nor milk which has come straight from the cow. Nor oysters—nothing but cooked food, and he always asks for bottled fruit rather than the natural product”32 With him, indeed, we are confronted with an inveterate city dweller who lived, loved, philosophized, and politicized in the middle of the city square, in the café, in the street, in plain view of everyone. His whole life is in fact marked by a profound aversion to privacy, secrecy, to the bad faith of concealment, inhibition, masquerading, and posturing. Ronald Hayman, his biographer, wrote that Sartre was a refugee from la vie THE CITY AND THE PHILOSOPHER 209 intériuere.33 This is not hyperbole, even if a bit misleading. More appropriately, Sartre was a demolisher, deŽler, deconstructor of the delusions of subjectivity, of a life that is lived alone, away, concealed from the look of the other. Self-consciousness is a nothingness, it thus cannot have its own space, or place. Its place is outside itself, beyond itself. Man [sic] is a creature of distances, as he liked to quote from Heidegger, but of social distances. His distaste for psychoanalysis was partly motivated by this phobia and distrust of privacy, of the dark recesses of a subjectivity not penetrable by analysis, not liable to objectiŽcation. Sartre’s philosophy is as much his attempt to disentangle the folding upon itself of the subject enshrined in idealism, psychologism, and objectivism, as it is his personal quest to extinguish privacy in his own life. His life became so much grist for his literature, as his philosophy was to be lived, by him, his friends, his lovers, a public credo. Gabriel Marcel, for whom the philosopher was truest to his calling by being in solitude, wrote that “Sartre’s world is the world as seen from the terrace of a café.”34 This is a very accurate description, for Sartre’s philosophy peers into the city from inside the city. His tenacious phenomenological eye and pen are constantly trained on the life of persons, moving, sitting, talking, reecting, objectifying, deceiving and trusting others, always under the look of others. Interestingly, despite the recent upsurge of interest in philosophers who paid attention to the city, Sartre shines in his absence. This is disconcerting since Sartre wrote extensively on the city, city life, buildings, and crowds. His numerous letters are sprinkled with incisive phenonemological explorations of cities: Berlin, Paris, Rome, London, etc. One letter in particular merits attention. It is a letter written from Naples during the summer of 1936 to Olga Kosakiewicz. This is a letter, an essay in fact, that goes on for twenty printed pages (!) describing at Žrst Neapolitans, and then their city.35 The physiognomy of Neapolitans, their sartorial customs, carnality, and habitus are noted down with acumen: the unabashed and unaffected display of bodies, the pervasiveness of inŽrmities, physical trauma, suffering and marked esh. The bodily composure and comportment of Neapolitans, however, is mirrored in the morphology of Naples: They drag their chairs and tables out into the street or to the doorways, half in, half out, and it is in this intermediate world that they perform the principal acts of their lives. So there is no longer any inside or outside; the street becomes the extension of their rooms, they Žll it with their intimate odors and their furniture. With their history, too. Imagine, walking down a street in Naples, we pass a clump of people sitting outside, busy doing in public everything the French do in private … And the outside is organically connected to the inside, it always gives me the feeling of a slightly bloody membrane pushed outside, accomplishing their numerous little gestations.36 Of the Neapolitan balcony, which is contrasted to that of Paris, an ornament, or Rouen, a luxury, Sartre writes that it is a respiratory organ. In fact, it is the street in the air.37 The streets in Naples, thus rise and descend, simultaneously. There is a transverse, a horizontal and vertical trajectory, a continuous mixing of outside and inside, up and down that gives the city its unique phenomenology. Neapolitan streets hang, rather than extend, distend, project, or wind. Almost a decade latter, Sartre is going to write about “American Cities.” In contrast to the European city, a shell, a fortiŽcation built by men to hold in abeyance nature, the American city is seen as an outpost in the wilderness, the desert. The city does not so much separate itself from nature as it moves and ows with the currents of man’s 210 E. MENDIETA interaction with nature. The American city is a moving landscape, just as the European city is an incrustation in nature that has become part of the history of nature itself.38 Whereas the European city is solid, stable, a monument of history, wherein people change while being outlived by their habitats, the American city is a perennially changing, transforming site, where its inhabitants are the carriers of the memory of cities but also of their hope for renewal and transformation. Nothing, however, betrays more starkly the contrast between both types of cities than the different worldviews that are disclosed by the streets of European and American cities. Sartre writes: In Europe, a street is half-way between the path of communication and the sheltered “public place.” It is on a footing with the cafés, as proved by the use of the “terrasses” that spring up on the sidewalks of the cafés in Žne weather. Thus it changes its aspect more than a hundred times a day, for the crowd that throngs the European street changes, and men are its primary element. The American street is a piece of highway. It sometimes stretches over many miles. It does not stimulate one to walk. Ours are oblique and twisting, full of bends and secrets. The American street is a straight line that gives itself away immediately. It contains no mystery.39 In the last instance, however, these outposts, waiting to be overrun by nature or the shifting thrusts of social forces, ciphers of impermanence, newness, even impatience, reveal the other side of the United States: “Here everyone is free—not to criticize or to reform their customs—but to ee them, to leave for the desert or another city. The cities are open, open to the world, and to the future.”40 The attempt to understand a people through a morphology of the city, to read the physiognomy of a culture through and in the habitus of a city, remained a central concern for Sartre. Among his notes for the second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, for instance, we Žnd sketches for a history of Venice.41 These phenomenological investigations of the city, however, are not episodic or aleatory to Sartre’s philosophical corpus. They are extensions, not to say the other side, of his concern with the spatializing/spatialized character of the For-Itself. The For-Itself, which is always the object of the look of another For-Itself, ascends to self-consciousness through its being and having been temporalized and spatialized by this other For-Itself. This is Sartre’s solution to the conundrum of modern philosophy. For Sartre, modern philosophy shipwrecked on the reefs of solipsism. Here one must speak of reefs, for solipsism manifested itself not only in the form of the self-referential and self-granting subject which cannot relate to others without falling into some aporetic circularity, but also in the impossibility of relating the subject to its world. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is a philosophical solution to the question of the philosophical scandals of the world and others.42 For Sartre, consciousness is Žrst and foremost a derivative mode of existence. It is an objectiŽed For-Itself. In other words, a For-Itself which has been made into an object for someone else’s consciousness. The other is not discovered after we have ascended to consciousness of ourselves. Rather, the other is the necessary presupposition of my own consciousness. The other is prior to my self-consciousness. In fact, the transcendental unity of apperception, Kant’s transcendental I, is substituted by Sartre for the Other. The other is “an a priori hypothesis with no justiŽcation save the unity which it permits to operate in our experience, an hypothesis which can not be thought without contradiction.”43 The other, however, is not a consciousness, disembodied or even localized in the THE CITY AND THE PHILOSOPHER 211 eyes of its gaze or its look. The other is part and parcel of the world. One may even say that the look is the world. The world envelopes the other, and the other appears with the world. The world and the other are given simultaneously and anteriorly to our self-consciousness. 44 For our purposes, this co-originary givenness of both the other and the world is what grants us place as it also bestows it on other things in the world. The Pour-Soi is in the world by being placed in the world by the look of the other. “The Other’s look confers spatiality upon me.”45 Thus, the En-Soi, a thing, is in the world in terms of my distance from it. It is placed in the world in relation to a speciŽc orientation that arises from a project and its practical references. Human reality is what grants place to others and things. “Human-reality is the being which causes a place to come to objects. Human reality alone, in so far as it is its own possibilities, can originally take a place.”46 To be in the midst of the world, however, is not something ethereal, abstract, or without material consequences. To be the object of someone else’s look is to be a body which is seen. The look of the other makes us blush and we are thus corporealized. To be in the world is to have a body. To take a place in the world, is to live out our bodies in that distended space that has become our place; of course, insofar as we assume it. As Sartre notes: Thus my being-in-the-world, by the sole fact that it realizes a world, causes itself to be indicated to itself as a being-in-the-midst-of-the-world by the world which it realizes … Thus to say that I have entered into the world, “come to the world,” or that there is a world, or that I have a body is one and the same thing. In this sense my body is everywhere in the world.47 My body, which is both placed and placing, spatialized and spatializing, is lived rather than encountered, just as the world is lived rather than discovered as already constituted. In so far as we live our bodies, we oscillate between having been spatialized and spatializing ourselves. Similarly, we live our bodies by oscillating between having been temporalized and temporalizing ourselves. The body, therefore, is something continuously being surpassed. It becomes the continuous trace of a consciousness reaching out for itself.48 Like the world is realized, as something which is testimony of a project that has been attained, the body is a “transcended transcendence.”49 I lived, and thus abandoned my body, in order to reach out to my self-consciousness, to live out the nothingness that I am. My body, a place in social space, is thus pure relationality: “… this place which I am is a relation. A univocal relation, to be sure, but a relation all the same. If I am limited to existing my place, I can not at the same time be elsewhere in order to establish this fundamental relation.”50 The body is relationality in and through the world, with the past, our present and future. Time and space, therefore, are given as the temporalizing and spatializing of a particular and contingent emplacement. This is facticity. Sartre writes, “… since the body is the facticity of the transcendencetranscended, it is always the body-which-points-beyond-itself; it is at once in space (it is the situation) and in time (it is freedom-as-object).”51 Thus far these phenomenological reections and insights into the ontological structure of human existence have neither betrayed nor concealed presuppositions and exclusions concerning gender and sexuality. This would seem to be consonant with the general thrust of Sartre’s project, namely that we choose ourselves, and that we are our freedom. As Sartre puts it: We have seen that human reality, far from being capable of being described as 212 E. MENDIETA libido or will to power, is a choice of being, either directly or through appropriation of the world. And we have seen—when the choice is expressed through appropriation—that each thing is chosen in the last analysis, not for its sexual potential but depending on the mode in which it renders being, depending on the manner in which being springs forth from its surface.52 Curiously, Sartre’s reections on the body also do not seem to presuppose or prejudge insights into the “sexed” or “gendered” ways in which we are emplaced, even if the En-Soi, the pure In-Itself, seems to be revealed to us by the qualities and adjectives of slime, viscosity, uidity, the undifferentiated, all of which he also associates with women. In other words, Sartre seems to be implying that gender and sexuality are not pertinent at the level of ontological determination, even if that which most patently discloses to us facticity is highly gendered and sexed. In terms of the basic categories of his ontological analysis, Sartre must reject the gendered or sexual body as examples of bad faith, as attempts to erode the ways in which we choose even our bodies. This rejection is similar to his rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis. The fact, however, is that while Sartre does not explicitly deal with the sexed and gendered nature of our assuming a place in the world, his entire philosophical system is informed by a “philosophical imaginary” that exploits crudely, parasitically, and even atavistically, a profound metaphysical sexism. A seemingly neutral, that is “foundational,” project that hopes to raise above the mundane is seriously compromised by its reliance upon a gendered, not to say “masculinist,” view of consciousness.53 The question of sexuality is raised explicitly by Sartre at the end of the book, at the very end of section III of part four, which is entitled “Quality as a Revelation of Being.”54 In this section, Sartre illustrates the ways in which his existential psychoanalysis interprets certain phobias and visceral reactions as examples of the ways in which being is disclosed through the qualities attributed to it. Here Sartre talks about slime, holes, and the sugary as so many ways of disclosing the docile, uid, evasive, engulŽng, and pliant character of the En-Soi. In this chapter, however, we also Žnd some statements so surprisingly offensive that one wonders how they escaped the censure of readers. One can quote these passages only after having resisted interjecting with objections, counter-examples, expletives, lest one give them any respectability or credibility. For instance, Sartre writes: But if we consider the slimy, we note that it presents a constant hysteresis in the phenomenon of being transmuted into itself. The honey which slides off my spoon on the honey contained in the jar Žrst sculptures the surface by fastening itself on it in relief, and its fusion with the whole is presented as a gradual sinking, a collapse which appears at once as a deation (think for example of children’s pleasure in playing with a toy which whistles when inated and groans mournfully when deating) and as display—like the attening out of the full breasts of a woman who is lying on her back … Actually we have here the image of destruction-creation … The slimy is docile.55 The slimy is that which both foils and resists the projecting forward of an existential project. It haunts the For-Itself perpetually, always frustrating its attempt to become that which is not and to cease being what it is. Slime: It is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking, it lives obscurely under my Žngers, and I sense it like a dizziness; it draws me to it as the bottom THE CITY AND THE PHILOSOPHER 213 of a precipice might draw me. There is something like a tactile fascination in the slimy … Slimy is the revenge of the In-Itself. A sickly-sweet, feminine revenge which will be symbolized on another level by the quality of the “sugary.”56 Furthermore, holes, like slime, are on the same level of disclosure. Holes, for instance, reveal to us the relationship between the In-Itself and the For-Itself, what Sartre called earlier the “feminine and masculine poles of the world.”57 The hole is a unique mode of being through which existential analysis elucidates the character of human existence. The hole is nothingness that presents to us a perennial challenge. Holes do not so much invite as they compel. Their seduction is ineluctable and unavoidable. Thus to plug up a hole means originally to make a sacriŽce of my body in order that the plenitude of being may exist; that is, to subject the passion of the For-Itself so as to shape, to perfect, and to preserve the totality of the In-Itself … A good part of our life is passed in plugging up holes, in Žlling empty spaces, in realizing and symbolically establishing a plenitude.58 With these observations, according to Sartre, we are now ready to pass over into a proper discussion of sexuality. Now that we understand that one of the most fundamental tendencies of our existence is to sacriŽce our bodies to the slime and viscosity of the world, and that we must do so by sacriŽcing ourselves to accomplish an unachievable plenitude of being; only now, purportedly, can we turn to sexuality, It is only from this standpoint that we can pass on to sexuality. The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which “gapes open.” It is an appeal to being as all holes are. In herself woman appeals to a strange esh which is to transform her into a fullness of being by penetration and dissolution. Conversely woman senses her condition as an appeal precisely because she is “in the form of a hole.” … Beyond any doubt her sex is a mouth and a voracious mouth which devours the penis—a fact which can easily lead to the idea of castration. The amorous act is the castration of the man; but this is above all because sex is a hole.59 As with slime, holes, and the female sex, so with cities and their sociality, their crowds. To come fully around to where we began, we should note that Sartre experienced a dual fascination and repulsion of cities and urbane life. He could not live without it. His philosophy would not have been possible without his voyeuristic gazing upon unsuspecting epitomes of existential psychoanalysis. Cities also represented the materiality of human existence, and to this extent they approximate in Sartre’s lexicon the slime and viscosity of the En-Soi. Note for instance the following passage from the 1936 letter discussed above: Everywhere mothers are nursing their babies in front of everyone, chatting with the neighbors. Of course, they do that in Rome too. But in Rome it was nastier, more fascist: it was the matron’s chaste immodesty, the lesson to the celibate, the severe reminder of motherhood’s precious role. Here, it’s animal, it Žts in with all the rest, with that all too contingent esh digesting and breathing as one, all those bodies freely exchanging their eas and their microbes … Yet Neapolitans don’t look at all proletarian. Taken as a whole, they seem not a class but a ock.60 214 E. MENDIETA Of course, as proletariat, they would have been a project. As a ock, however, they are inert, pure immanence. In What is Literature?, Sartre disapprovingly says something similar of the contemporary relationship between an author and his audience: To-day the public, in relation to the writer, is in a state of passivity: it waits for ideas or a new art form to be imposed upon it. It is the inert mass wherein the idea will assume esh. Its means of control is indirect and negative; one can not say that it gives its opinion; it simply buys or does not buy the book; the relationship between author and reader is analogous to that of male and female: reading has become a simple means of information and writing a very general means of communication.61 The writer, in other words, writes on the eshy surface of society; his subjectivity is sacriŽced and projected upon an inert mass, a ock, just as the male projects himself upon the pliant and viscous, supplicant and metaphysically inviting, materiality of the woman. The scientist is no different. Knowledge and scientiŽc investigation, which are modes of appropriation, are described as penetration and superŽcial caress: “The scientist is the hunter who surprises a white nudity and rapes it with his gaze.”62 All surfaces, whether esh, paper, or sociality, represent an En-Soi to be written over by an autarkic demi-god whose project of authenticity must always be foiled by the inert and intractable eshiness of a world that is female and is disclosed as such in her sex which is a hole. In Sartre, image, imagination, and imaginary—that is, spatial practice, representations of space, and representational spaces—converge in the dual images of the city and the female body. His philosophizing is not only motivated by the city, and the way it places one as a subject, but it also, in turn, projects certain images and imaginaries of space. For Sartre, in the last instance, the city, like the female body, is a surface upon which to project the male, masculine, autarchical project of freedom. In his existential psychoanalysis and ontological phenomenology the male is to the female, as philosophy is to the city: projecting self-consciousness and freedom on one side, passive receptacle and conniving adversity on the other. Conclusion The phenomenological method seeks to circumvent the paradoxes produced by the extremes of rationalism, which gives primacy to ahistorical and disembodied concepts, on the one hand, and empiricism, which gives primacy to brute facts and an already established world, on the other. It tries to do this by demonstrating how the body is always already conceptual and how thought is always already embodied. There is no way in which concepts are not made possible by an embodied experience and practice, and these later in turn remain obscure and meaningless unless they are formalized into concepts. Sartre’s ontological phenomenology took the method a step further and both spatialized and sexualized the embodied practices from which any investigation was to proceed. In fact, much of Sartre’s success as a phenomenologist resided in his ability to concretize the embodied practice from which the phenomenological reduction was to proceed. This keen ability, doubtlessly related to his skill as a writer, has allowed him to be appropriated by critics of racism.63 Racism, and sexism, are practices that affect, nay, regiment, torture, manipulate, auction off, trade, and last but not least exterminate and excise, the body of agents that have been racialized.64 Nonetheless, the agency, i.e., ability to act in social space, of these agents is enabled by certain spatial practices, representational spaces, and spaces of representation, to use Lefebvre terminology again. THE CITY AND THE PHILOSOPHER 215 That Sartre could not see his own misogyny is partly related to his philosophy, and the way in which his love of cities is intimate with his penchant, if not obsession, with exposure, confession and objectiŽcation. Sartre’s phenomenology, as well as his later existential dialectics, illustrate excellently the central thesis of this essay: that the city imagines philosophy, and conversely, that philosophy thinks the city. Paris, Naples, and so on, were the cities from, and out of, which Sartre thought about the other as primarily the object of a gaze, a look. Sartre’s phenomenology, whether ontological or existential, became the crystallization of a series of cosmopolitan cities. Phenomenology became a way in which certain cities thought and imagined their own modus vivendi and ethos, namely as being always at the mercy of someone else’s look. Through Sartre’s key hole, through this act of philosophical voyeurism, we can being to see things like: Heidegger’s hut, and his dislike for big cities, and the way in which his philosophy was about a monastic purism that dreads the touch of the other, Das Man. Kant, in Köningsberg, thinking about the a priori, people setting their clocks to the rhythm of Kant’s daily walks to and from the university, and the way in which he thought he could produce an anthropology without having to ever leave his beloved Köningsberg. A history of philosophy as a history of the relationship between the city and its different schools, currents, traditions, begins to proŽle itself in the horizon. Acknowledgements I want to thank Lois Ann Lorentzen for her extremely helpful comments, Andrew Light for his comments, encouragement and patience, and the anonymous readers of Philosophy and Geography, whose suggestions and questions have helped me Žne tune my argument, as well as Johannes Fritsche, who upon hearing my description of this project immediately gave me textual examples to illustrate my thesis. Notes 1. On the traditional forms of doing the history of philosophy, see the excellent discussion by Richard Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in his Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 247–73; for the latter type of history of philosophy, see Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 2. Although clues and building blocks for such a history can be gathered from Pierre Ansay and René Schoonbrodt, eds, Penser la ville: choix de textes philosophiques (Bruxelles: Éditions des Archives D’Architecture Moderne, 1989). 3. Without question this insight, its exploration, its substantiation has to be attributed to the work of feminist philosophers, in the Continental tradition. I will list only the ones that have most inuence my thinking directly: Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993); Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1991); Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay concerning Women, Philosophy, trans. Trista Selous (Oxford, UK & Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1991); Nancy Duncan, ed., Bodyspace: destabilizing geographies of gender and sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Gillian Rose, Feminism & Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); and of course, Simone de Beauvior’s The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 4. See my “Chronotopology: Critique of Spatio-Temporal Regimes,” in New Critical Theory, eds Jeffrey Paris and William Wilkerson (Lanham: Rowman and LittleŽeld Pubs., forthcoming). 5. Philosophy has its unconscious, and this is generally assigned a place: the horizon, the wild, the desert, the sea, the darkness, the corner, the underground, the celestial heights. The other of reason: folds, recoils, conceals, turns, pulls, circumvents, masks, unmasks, etc. Evidently, and according to my own 216 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. E. MENDIETA proposal, a complete archeology of the sites of the production of philosophy would have to include not just the city, but also the imaginary places against which the sovereignty and autonomy of philosophy garrisons itself. See two seminal texts on this question: Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), and Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). The reason why I do not discuss, explicitly, his Critique of Dialectical Reason, is not a philosophical but very mundane one. It is almost twenty years since I read the Žrst 250 pages of this dense book before I abandoned it to not return to it. Still, I think that the Sartre most people are familiar with is the Sartre or Being and Nothingness. Furthermore, in terms of the larger goal of the complete text of which this present essay is a part, I wanted to focus on phenomenological readings (Sartre and Heidegger), and show their opposite relationships to the city. This already disinclined me to read the later Sartre. For a discussion of the use of the name Peripatetic for Aristotle’s school, see W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. VI. Aristotle: An Encounter (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981), 29. I am thinking here of Umberto Eco’s claim about the relationship between Thomism and Gothic Cathedrals, on the one hand, but also of Angel Rama’s claims about cities in the New World and the Logic of Port Royal, see Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), and Angel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. John Charles Chasteen (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1991), 44. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38. See Henning Bech, “Citysex: Representing Lust in Public,” in Love & Eroticism, ed. Mike Feathersone (London: Sage Publications, 1999), 215–42. Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995). See the monumental and indispensable Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds, A Companion to the City (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), especially part III, “Cities of Division and Difference.” See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). See the comments about cities and their representation as female by Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 177 ff. See Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), especially chapters 5, 7. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38. See the incisive discussion of the historical production of views of space by Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, 84–101. See also Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39. For a useful and succinct discussion of Lefebvre’s key concepts, see Andy MerriŽeld, “Henri Lefebvre: A Socialist in Space,” in Thinking in Space, eds Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 167–82. See also Richard Peet, Modern Geographical Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 100–6. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion, 104. See Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). See Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, 1987), and Jacqueline M. Martinez, Phenomenology of Chicana Experience & Identity: Communication and Transformation in Praxis (Lanham, MD: Rowman & LittleŽeld, 2000). In addition to the works already cited in note 3 above, I have in mind here the work of Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Kelly Oliver, Subjectivity without Subjects: From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (Lanham, MD: Rowman & LittleŽeld, 1998). Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), especially chapter 5: “The Fact of Blackness,” 109 ff., see also Albert Memmi, Racism, trans. Steve Martinot (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2000). This is what David Harvey’s work does, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), and The Urban Experience (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). THE CITY AND THE PHILOSOPHER 217 29. See Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Essential Works of Foucault. 1954–1984. Volume Two, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1998), 175–86. See Edward Casey’s discussion of this text in The Fate of Place, 296–301. 30. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 31. 31. In a chapter long version of this essay, I illustrate the relationship between philosophy, the city, and gendering through a comparison and contrast between Sartre and Heidegger. Both thinkers represent almost diametrically opposed attitudes to the city, to the body, and to society. Yet, their work is marked by the same quest for the ontological through the lens of the phenomenological, albeit with different emphases and obviously with different results. While one is urbane, positively a creature of the city, crowds, seeking and thriving in the public eye, the other is a recluse, not to say phobic of public spaces, especially those involving crowds. One could not imagine a more jarring apposition. Indeed, it is their contrast, their almost radical difference that makes more stark the ways in which they both are parasitic on the city and philosophy’s relationship to it. The full chapter will appear in my work The Geography of Utopia. 32. Quoted in Ronald Hayman, Sartre: A Biography (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1992), 110. 33. Hayman, Sartre, 110. 34. Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: The Citadel Press, 1967), 59; compare with his own views on philosophy, 124. 35. Some of the observations in this letter made it into a small piece of Žction Sartre published in 1938: Jean-Paul Sartre, “Foods,” in The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. Volume 2: Selected Prose, eds Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 60–3. 36. Simone de Beauvoir, ed., Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir 1926–1939, trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1992), 64. 37. de Beauvoir, Witness to My Life, 68–9. 38. Jean-Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Collier Books, 1965), 117. 39. Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, 123. 40. Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, 125. 41. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Vol. 2 (UnŽnished) The Intelligibility of History, trans. Quintin Hoare (London. New York: Verso, 1991), 442 ff. 42. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 223 ff. 43. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 227. 44. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 351. 45. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 266. 46. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 278. 47. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 318. 48. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 326. 49. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 347. 50. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 491. 51. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 351. 52. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 602. 53. The texts that have guided me most in the following reections are Le Doeuff’s Hipparchia’s Choice, and Margaret Collins and Christine Pierce, “Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre’s Psychoanalysis,” in Women and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation, eds Carol C. Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), 112–27. Also Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Oxford UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell, 1994), chapter 5: “Freedom and Flirtation: The Personal and the Philosophical in Sartre and Beauvoir,” 125–47. 54. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 600 ff. 55. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 608. 56. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 609. 57. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 601. 58. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 613. 59. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 613–14. 60. de Beauvoir, Witness to my Life, 54–5. 61. Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1965), 81. My italics. 62. Sartre in Being and Nothingness, quoted by Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice, 79. 218 E. MENDIETA 63. The classic case is Frantz Fanon’s, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), but see also Lewis R. Gordon’s Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995). 64. See my “The Modernity of Race and the Race of Modernity: Foucault’s Genealogy of Racism,” forthcoming, and Michel Foucault, ,, Il faut défendre la sociéte .. (1975–1976) (Seuil: Gallimard, Février, 1997). Note on contributor Eduardo Mendieta is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of From Hermeneutics to Semiotics: Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy (Rowman & LittleŽeld, forthcoming), and is at work on a book about Utopia. Copyright of Philosophy & Geography is the property of Carfax Publishing Company and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.