Casey (2011:ix) – ser e lugar

O que quer que seja verdade para espaço e tempo, isto é verdade para lugar: estamos imersos nele e não poderíamos passar sem ele. Para ser — para existir de alguma forma — é preciso estar algures, e estar algures é estar em alguma espécie de lugar. O lugar é tão necessário como o ar que respiramos, o chão que pisamos, os corpos que temos. Estamos rodeados de lugares. Passamos por cima e através deles. Vivemos em lugares, relacionamo-nos com os outros neles, morremos neles. Nada do que fazemos está fora de um lugar. Como poderia ser de outra forma? Como é que não reconhecemos este fato primordial?

Whatever is true for space and time, this much is true for place: we are immersed in it and could not   do without it. To be at all—to exist in any way—is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place. Place is as requisite as the air we breathe, the ground on which we stand  , the bodies we have. We are surrounded by places. We walk over and through them. We live in places, relate to others in them, die in them. Nothing we do is unplaced. How could it be otherwise? How could we fail to recognize this primal fact?

Aristotle   recognized it. He made “where” one of the ten indispensable categories of every substance, and he gave a sustained and perspicacious account of place in his Physics. His discussion set off a debate that has lasted until the present day. Heidegger, for example, contends with Aristotle as to what being in a place signifies for “being-in-the-world.” More recently still, Irigaray has returned to Aristotle’s idea   of place as essential to an ethics of sexual difference. Between Aristotle and Irigaray stretch more than two millennia of thought and teaching and writing about place—a period that includes such diverse debating partners as Iamblichus and Plotinus  , Cusa and Bruno, Descartes   and Locke, Newton   and Leibniz  , Bachelard and Foucault  .

Yet the history of this continuing concern with place is virtually unknown. Unknown in that it has been hidden from view. Not deliberately or for the sake of being obscure, much less to mislead: unlike the unconscious, place is not so controversial or so intrusive or embarrassing as to require repression. On the contrary, just because place is so much with us, and we with it, it has been taken for granted, deemed not worthy of separate treatment. Also taken for granted is the fact that we are implaced beings to begin with, that place is an a priori   of our existence on earth. Just because we cannot choose in the matter, we believe we do not have to think about this basic facticity very much, if at all. Except when we are disoriented or lost—or contesting Aristotle’s Physics—we presume that the question is settled, that there is nothing more to say on the subject.

But there is a great deal to say, even if quite a lot has been said already by previous thinkers. Yet this rich tradition   of place-talk has been bypassed or forgotten for the most part, mainly because place has been subordinated to other terms taken as putative absolutes: most notably, Space and Time. Beginning with Philoponus in the sixth century A.D. and reaching an apogee in fourteenth-century theology and above all in seventeenth-century physics, place has been assimilated to space. The latter, regarded as infinite extension, has become a cosmic and extracosmic Moloch that consumes every corpuscle of place to be found within its greedy reach. As a result, place came to be considered a mere “modification” of space (in Locke’s revealing term)—a modification that aptly can be called “site,” that is, leveled-down, monotonous space for building and other human enterprises. To make matters worse, in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries place was also made subject to time, regarded as chronometric and universal, indeed as “the formal   a priori condition of all appearances whatsoever,” in Kant  ’s commanding phrase.1 Even space, as the form of “outer sense,” became subject to temporal   determination. Place, reduced to locations between which movements of physical bodies occur, vanished from view almost altogether in the era of temporo-centrism (i.e., a belief in the hegemony of time) that has dominated the last   two hundred years of philosophy in the wake of Hegel  , Marx  , Kierkegaard  , Darwin, Bergson  , and William James.

I say that place disappeared “almost altogether.” It never went entirely out of sight. Part of its very hiddenness—as Heidegger would insist—includes being at least partially unhidden. In bringing out the concealed history of place, I shall show that place has continued to possess considerable significance despite its discontinuous acknowledgment. Thus Plato  ’s Timaeus, though stressing space as chōra, ends with the creation of determinate places for material things. Philoponus, taken with the idea of empty dimensions, maintains nonetheless that three-dimensional space is always in fact filled with places. Descartes finds room for place as volume and position within the world of extended space. Even Kant accords to place a special privilege in the constitution of what he calls “cosmic regions,” thanks to the role of the body in orientation—a role that, a century and a half later, will provide a key to twentieth-century conceptions of place in the work of Whitehead, Husserl  , Merleau-Ponty  , and Irigaray. But in every such case (and in still others to be discussed in this book) it is a matter of drawing place out of its latent position in the manifest texts of Western philosophy, retrieving it from its textual tomb, bringing it back alive.