Space, Subjectivity, and Politics

Alternatives 31 (2006), 105–134
Space, Subjectivity, and Politics
David Howarth*
This article questions the more exaggerated claims of a free-

standing “spatial heuristic” in explaining, justifying and criti-
cizing social practices, not least because the category of space
remains undertheorized and conceptually indeterminate. Build-
ing upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Mar-
tin Heidegger, Ernesto Laclau, and others, the article clarifies
the category of space, showing precisely how and why it is im-
portant for understanding politics, subjectivity, and ethics. It
calls for the envisaging of “spaces of heterogeneity” that are
compatible with radical democratic demands for equality and
a “politics of becoming,” and that can form the basis of a post-
structuralist conception of cosmopolitanism. KEYWORDS: ethics,
politics, space, subjectivity, time, radical democracy.
The face of the earth is continually changing, by the increase

of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of
great empires into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of
colonies, by the migration of tribes. Is there any thing discov-
erable in all these events but force and violence? Where is the
mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of?
—David Hume, 19931
It is widely acknowledged that our conceptions and experiences of

space have changed considerably in recent times. They have been
transformed by the development of new or more sophisticated
technologies, such as the Internet, the jet plane, and the mobile
phone, which bring things and people that were once distant
closer, while simultaneously rendering others further away. An elec-
tronic version of an academic journal article available on the Inter-
net and accessible on one’s computer screen is far closer than the
hard copy resting on the shelves of the university library, even
*Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK, C04 3SQ.

E-mail: davidh@essex.ac.uk
105
106 Space, Subjectivity, and Politics
though the source of the former might be many thousands of miles

away.2 Similarly, an out-of-town shopping mall reachable by motor
car is widely perceived to be nearer than the local shop to which
one can walk or cycle, even though the physical distance of the for-
mer far exceeds the latter. Air travel has made the cities and places
of other countries more accessible to many citizens than the re-
gions, towns, and rural areas of their own countries.
It is also alleged that alongside these altered subjective experi-
ences correspond important objective changes in the character of
space itself. Firstly, the globalization of financial markets acceler-
ates economic exchanges, bringing spatially dispersed agents and
institutions closer together to trade and invest, while intensely
affecting social actors and processes across the globe. Secondly, the
increasing mobility of individual capitals, which are able to relo-
cate their firms in order to offset falling profits and/or to secure
relative locational advantage, triggers an ongoing dialectic of de-
territorialization and reterritorialization as competing social forces
seek to fix the spatial positioning of plants and businesses. And
lastly, the rapid development and spread of new technologies in
the fields of communication and transportation has resulted in
what Marx called the annihilation of “space with time,” as once
fixed and seemingly natural spatial barriers and boundaries—such
as territorially delimited frontiers—are eroded by increases in the
speed of sending material goods, information, and people.3 “All
that is solid melts into the air,” Marx wrote famously in The Com-
munist Manifesto, and his prophecy is as prescient as ever. In short,
a whole host of phenomena, ranging from the weakening and
porosity of national territorial boundaries, the actual and potential
“globalization of contingency” in the form of global pandemics
and the specter of environmental catastrophe, to the backlash of
increasing territorialization as new forms of imperialism, inter-
national isolationism, political fundamentalism, ethnonationalist
particularism, or projects for a “fortress Europe”—seek to reverse
these trends, point to the increasing salience of changing concep-
tions of space and time in our contemporary globalizing world.
In social and political theory, the so-called “spatial turn” is
equally well-established. Social theorists and political economists
such as David Harvey, Bob Jessop, and Alain Lipietz employ con-
cepts such as “spatial” and “spatio-temporal” fixes to explain the
way crisis tendencies in the logic of capital accumulation are offset
and displaced in the capitalist mode of production.4 Urban social
theorists such as Manuel Castells, Henri Lefebvre, and Jean Lojkine
stress the spatial determinants of social and political processes, such
as the provision of means of collective consumption.5 The historian
David Howarth 107
Benedict Anderson incorporates spatial dimensions of analysis into

his account of the power of nationalist ideologies to forge political
identities.6
There have also been efforts to connect reflections about space
directly to politics. In For Space, for instance, Doreen Massey chal-
lenges the widespread “fact that space has so often been excluded
from, or inadequately conceptualized in relation to, and has thereby
debilitated our conceptions of, politics and the political,” and then
develops “an argument for the recognition of particular characteris-
tics of space and for a politics that can respond to them.”7 Similarly,
Margaret Kohn’s Radical Space puts spatial concerns at the center of
democratic theory by examining different sites of working-class and
popular mobilizations in Western Europe.8 She focuses on the cre-
ation of case del popolo (“houses of the people”) as sites of resistance
and transformative political practices in turn-of-the-[twentieth]-
century Italy. For her, political groups created distinctive places to
develop new identities and practices, while using such public spaces
to democratize ever-widening sets of social relations.
And if these affirmed relations are not as stark as Henri Lefebvre’s
bold assertion that “Space is political,” that is, “not a scientific
object removed from ideology or politics,” but “always . . . political
and strategic,” then it is still regarded as integral for analyzing
social reality and political practices today.9 Viewed in this light, it is
unsurprising that Hardt and Negri’s widely discussed books Empire
and Multitude put issues such as space, territorialization, and deter-
ritorialization at the heart of their analyses.10 In sum, it is fair to say
that in contemporary political theory, at both the explanatory and
normative levels of analysis, locutions such as “private and public
spaces,” “the conception of a plurality of political spaces,” the public
sphere as “a space of opposition and accountability,” “quasi-public
space,” “spaces of resistance,” “territorialization and deterritorial-
ization,” “public spaces of freedom,” “dialogic spaces,” and so forth,
continue to flourish in our attempts to come to terms with the late
modern condition.11
Despite this proliferating theoretical and empirical discourse,
however, the precise meaning of the category of space has not
been rendered more perspicuous. To the contrary, not only is
there significant dispute about the different meanings of space, but
there has been much debate about its importance for social and
political analysis. In this article, I begin by considering these ambigu-
ities and disputes, after which I endeavor to develop a category of
space that can inform our understanding of social and physical space,
while profitably addressing a number of pressing questions in con-
temporary political theory. I then explore the ethical and political
implications of this conception by addressing a series of pressing

concerns in our contemporary world. Here I focus especially on
the construction of political boundaries, the inner composition of
social space, and the question of political subjectivity.
(How) Does Space Matter?
Let me begin with two opposed accounts of space. On the one

hand, Doreen Massey argues that
Geography matters in both its senses, of distance/nearness/

betweenness and of the physical variation of the earth’s surface
(the two being closely related) is not a constraint on a pre-existing
non-geographical social and economic world. It is constitutive of
that world.12
In a later exchange with Laclau she goes on to claim that “Spatial

form as ‘outcome’ . . . has emergent powers which can have effects
on subsequent events.”13 Indeed, the claims of Massey and those
sympathetic to her project have been generalized into what Ed Soja
calls a “socio-spatial dialectic,” in which the “structure of organized
space is . . . a dialectically defined component of the general rela-
tions of production, relations of production which are simultane-
ously social and spatial.”14 In a similar fashion, Anthony Giddens
argues that “Space is not an empty dimension along which social
groupings become structured, but has to be considered in terms of
its involvement in the constitution of systems of interaction.”15
On the other hand, other theorists strongly question the rele-
vance, indeed the coherence, of Massey’s claims, and they dispute
Kohn’s call for a “spatial heuristic,” or David Harvey’s project to
construct a “historical-geographical materialism.”16 A strong ver-
sion of this critique is put forward by Peter Saunders, who argues
that social theory is “necessarily non-spatial in the sense that space
is not and cannot be an object of theoretical inquiry. The search
for a political economy theory of space, or a sociological theory of
space, is a non-starter.”17 This critique is a variant of the argument
from redundancy or triviality: The addition of the adjective “spa-
tial” to “social relations,” “social forms,” or “social processes,” or
the qualification of any practice with the adverb “spatially,” or
indeed the verb “to spatialize,” adds little or nothing substantive to
our understanding and explanation of social phenomena. Saun-
ders’ strongly skeptical position is shared by theorists such as Michel
de Certeau, Frederic Jameson, Ernesto Laclau, and Rob Walker,
David Howarth 109
who in their different ways play down or are critical of the val-
orization of space.18
This basic division is characteristic of much reflection on space.
Indeed, the dichotomy is often inscribed into the very accounts of
space themselves. It is evident, for example, in the work of both
Massey and Kohn. In these conceptions, the category of space is
split between a stronger set of claims in which space is conceded
“emergent properties” and “causal powers” that bring about social
and political effects, and a much weaker position in which space
refers to the specific “spatial contexts” and “spatial conjunctures”
(or better, social contexts or structures) wherein social and politi-
cal processes simply take place.
Exemplary in this regard is Kohn’s intervention, which moves
us directly to the political and normative/ethical aspects of space.
On one side, her book is replete with claims about the determining
power and function of space and spatial forms: “Space affects how
individuals and groups perceive their place in the order of things.
Spatial configurations naturalize social relations by transforming con-
tingent forms into a permanent landscape that appears as im-
mutable rather than open to contestation. By providing a shared
background, spatial forms serve the function of integrating indi-
viduals into a shared conception of reality.”19 And Kohn goes on to
isolate a number of distinctive, positive properties of space, which
include the function “to initiate, maintain, or interrupt inter-
action”; to “encourage or inhibit contact between people”; and to
“determine the form and scope of contact.”20 These reflections cul-
minate in the advocacy of what she calls “a spatial heuristic,” which
“can illuminate domains of political experience that have hitherto
remained obscured in a culture that emphasizes visual and linguis-
tic knowledges.”21
In other statements, space is simply the site or place wherein
processes and practices take place. In this much weaker version of
the argument, space is depicted as “a terrain of struggle for control
over bodies, movement, labour, meaning and sociability,” and the
radical democratic project is enriched by looking “at the diverse
places where politics takes place: festivals, town squares, chambers of
labour, mutual aid societies, union halls, night schools, coopera-
tives, houses of the people.” What is of interest in this version is a
relational connection or “pattern of interaction” between space
and social practice.22
One significant implication of this undecidability and lack of con-
ceptual clarity is that while the alleged benefits of connecting space
to questions about politics, subjectivity, and ethics are frequently
alluded to, they are never properly explored and accomplished.
Much is said in Kohn’s work, for instance, about the relationship

between certain types of space and the possibility of radical democ-
racy. However, the closest we come to exploring this connection in
depth is the desire to construct particular spaces that can become
“liberatory” places of identity formation “vis-à-vis a particular form
of domination” (the construction of distinctive places within which
“to develop new identities and practices”) and to criticize “non-
spatial” social forms of organization that “do not build dense, over-
lapping social bonds.”23 In short, we are left ultimately with a set of
aspirational statements about the construction of spaces that can
potentially engender “co-presence” among subjects, thus advancing
popular demands and solidarities, but little engagement with the
theoretical and practical conditions for their attainment.
The underlying reason for these ambiguities and vacillations is
that the category of space is never really defined and constructed in
a rigorous theoretical fashion. It is either derived from our everyday
intuitions about space (“extension,” “containment,” “boundedness,”
and so on) or made synonymous with concepts developed in vari-
ous models of theoretical physics where space is equated with phys-
ical space.24 Equally problematic is a reliance on ordinary lan-
guage, which focuses on the way the word space is used for a variety
of purposes in different contexts, some metaphorical and others
not, thus sidestepping the task of articulating a theoretical concept
of space from which analytical and empirical consequences can be
drawn. For instance, in the introduction to Kohn’s book the con-
cept of space receives a number of different predicates, ranging
from locutions such as “spaces of resistance” and “political sites” to
definitions where space refers to an object or resource for politi-
cal use.25 Indeed, the term space is qualified in innumerable ways:
“social,” “political,” “conceptual,” “radical democratic,” and so on.
Alternatively, in the work of Kohn, Harvey, and others, the cate-
gory of space is often used interchangeably with concepts such as
“place,” locale, or even habitus.26 In short, while I am sympathetic
to those who question the more exaggerated claims about the role
of space as an independent explanatory variable in analyzing social
relations, the “value added” amounts at times to little more than a
formal acknowledgment that social practices occur within space.
Nevertheless, it is also important not to throw the baby out with
the bath water.27 This is because the different explanatory and nor-
mative language games that can and have been played with the cat-
egory of space, especially its relationship with time, are multifarious
and potentially illuminating. Indeed, I shall argue that the specific
“spatial mappings” within which social processes take place, and in
particular the political logics that structure such spatial mappings,
David Howarth 111
are central to our understanding of contemporary politics. Equally,

there is a prima facie case that the relation between our concep-
tion of space and questions about subjectivity and ethics are impor-
tant for a rethinking of (radical) democratic politics. Of particular
importance here is the way we construct boundaries between
spaces, the inner constitution of social space, and the type of polit-
ical subjectivity that can populate such spaces. However, in order
for these phenomena and relations to be explored, there is first a
need for both conceptual and theoretical clarification of space.
Theorizing Space
I begin with Ernesto Laclau’s attempt to develop a notion of space

by establishing a dialectical relationship between space and time.
As he puts it, “Temporality must be conceived as the exact opposite
of space. The ‘spatialization’ of an event consists of eliminating its
temporality.”28 He then articulates these ideas by referring to Freud’s
Fort/Da game:
Through the game the child symbolizes the absence of the

mother, which is a traumatic event. If the child comes to terms
with that absence in this way, it is because absence is no longer
just absence but becomes the moment of the presence-absence
succession. Symbolization means that the total succession is pre-
sent in each of its moments. This synchronicity of the successive
means that the succession is in fact a total structure, a space for
symbolic representation and constitution.29
In this view, then, to use terms borrowed from the early Heidegger,
space is an ontological category that characterizes all social struc-
tures and any system of social relations, and not an ontical category
that refers to particular sorts of space, which are informed by an
underlying set of ontological assumptions.30
More precisely, space is defined as “any repetition that is gov-
erned by a structural law of successions,” whereas temporality
refers to the “pure effect of dislocation,” that is, the “ultimate fail-
ure of all hegemonization,” so that “only the dislocation of the
structure, only a maladjustment which is spatially unrepresentable,
is an event.”31 Time is thus equated with an irreducible negativity
and conceptualized as dislocation; and by weaving the dimensions
of space and time together, while rejecting the possibility of a final
dialectical overcoming, Laclau adumbrates the concept of an “in-
complete ordering” that articulates the spatial and the temporal in
a new conceptual infrastructure. Thus it is in the interplay between
order and disruption that we can specify the relationship between

time and space, as well as thinking about the logic of spatialization
and the theorization of social and political spaces.
Before developing this idea further, however, it is worth point-
ing out that Laclau’s initial formulation is ambiguous between his
stress on the absent mother, who is then represented (that is, spa-
tialized) in “a presence-absence succession,” and the constitutive
absence that haunts any structural relationship. In the case of the
latter, the constitutive notion of negativity, any representation is but
one link in an infinite supplementary chain designed to “fill” a pri-
mordial absence. The latter implies that a fully constituted space
includes both structural succession and structural co-presence or
co-existence, as they both involve an occlusion of the temporal,
which is here synonymous with primordial absence. In contrast to
Laclau, then, I take the category of space to refer to any law or order
of relations that yields a structural regularity between objects, whether it
take the form of succession or co-existence, and the key element in this
conception is the fixation and representation of objects—the ren-
dering visible of objects—whether they are literally or empirically
present or absent.
Now, using Kant’s terminology, I take this category of space to
be a regulative, rather than a constitutive idea. That is to say, it is
an idea that serves only to direct “the understanding towards a cer-
tain goal upon which the routes marked out by all its rules con-
verge, as upon their point of intersection. . . . [It] is indeed a mere
idea . . . from which, since it lies quite outside the bounds of pos-
sible experience, the concepts of the understanding do not in real-
ity proceed.”32 In other words, the category of space is a regulative
idea because it can never be actualized in its pure form. Instead,
borrowing from Derrida, any actual, concrete space is never “purely
repetitious” (or purely regular), as every repetition is marked and
contaminated by an alteration: repetitions are, so to speak, struc-
tures of iterability that are marked by a logic of différance (that is,
both differing and deferring).33 This means that all structure and
all objectivity is marked by an absence, and is therefore lacking.
Indeed, in this sense, negativity and dislocation—the specter of
temporality and contingency, both as a generalized condition of
“disjointedness” and as an event—are constitutive features of space.
This brings us to the second and related ontological category of
“spatialization,” which refers to the logic of representing or symbolizing
an event by reducing its essential contingency to a repetitive structural form.
In Laclau’s words, “The spatialization of the event’s temporality takes
place through repetition, through the reduction of its variation to an
invariable nucleus which is an internal moment of the pre-given
David Howarth 113
structure.”34 Again, however, such repetitions are always related to

other appearances and representations, as “each element appear-
ing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than
itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element,
and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the
future element.”35 This means, ultimately, that an appearance is
always divided by an “interval” that separates “the present from
what it is not in order for the present to be itself.” Crucially, this
means that because the interval helps constitute the appearance
itself, each appearance is internally divided between its identity and
its difference. Derrida captures this “movement of signification”
with what he calls a logic of “spacing,” which is “the becoming-space
of time and the becoming-time of space.”36 In this conception, then,
what we might term “spatial practices” (those social practices that
endeavor to construct and thus represent objects in certain ways) can
be understood as specific drives to realize or actualize the impossibil-
ity of pure or full representation, and the divided and impure forms
of representation that arise are nothing other than the (impossible)
effects of such spatial practice.
In this picture, then, practices of “spacing” and “spatialization”
are constitutive of signification and meaning in general. However,
there is a special subset of practices that are constitutive of spatial
practices and the social spaces to which they give rise and then sed-
iment. They are what I shall call “political practices,” and are gov-
erned by a logic of hegemony. The latter consists of two basic com-
ponents, each of which represents a response to the dislocatory
effects of temporality. In the first place, it can take the form of a
logic of equivalence in which the making visible of temporality,
where the latter is understood as the eruption of dislocatory events
for example, entails the construction of antagonistic relations
between subjects. Here the particularity of each identity in a system
of differences, whether understood as “demands” or “identities,” is
annulled and rendered equivalent by virtue of their differentiation
from something that they are not. Typically, for instance, a national
liberation struggle against an occupying colonial power will cancel
out the particular differences of class, ethnicity, region, or religion
in the name of a more universal nationalism that can serve as a
common reference point for all the oppressed, and which in turn
is defined only in opposition to the oppressive regime.37
The second component, the logic of difference, involves the
representation or staging of dislocation (in general terms: its
spatialization) by the construction of identities as “merely differ-
ent” from one another. In this logic, equivalential or “overdeter-
mined” identities can be articulated as particularities within a set of
contrasting elements. In other words, to use Wittgenstein’s termi-

nology, it involves the production of a system of “family resem-
blances,” where identities are related to one another by a set of
overlapping similarities and differences. This logic consists, in
turn, of different modalities. These include a modality of trans-
formism in which the demands and identities of an existing antago-
nistic construction are disentangled, and thus tamed within an
existing system of rules and institutions, either by being isolated
from one another or addressed in a punctual fashion; a modality of
containment or conflict management whereby antagonisms are played
off against one another (practices of divide and rule, for example)
so as to blunt their political edge; and a logic of pre-emption in which
the possibilities of conflict are forestalled before they are able to
become antagonistic constructs (such as practices of cooptation
and coercion).38
As the construction of identity in the logic of equivalence is pred-
icated on the positing of a purely negative identity, which through its
active exclusion functions to forge an equivalential chain, it neces-
sarily involves the division of social space into two antagonistic
camps. In the case of the differential logic, by contrast, there is a
complexification and multiplication of various social spaces, as
identities are “merely different” from one another. Nevertheless,
crucial to both aspects of the logic of hegemony is the establish-
ment (or better: the re-establishment) of political frontiers (the
drawing of boundaries between “insiders” and “outsiders”) that
forge identity through the production of antagonistic relations
between differently positioned subjectivities. This is clear in the
logic of equivalence, where an empty signifier is required to repre-
sent the “impossible fullness” of an ultimately lacking system, but it
is also evident in the logic of difference (with its various modali-
ties), as the maintenance and reproduction of any order depends
finally on the constitution and maintenance of a margin or bound-
ary that separates the system from its other. In the contemporary
state system, for instance, “sovereignty” is still the name for this
spatial and social division, though the flaws and contradictions of
this “impossible fullness” are increasingly evident.
Physical Space, Territory, and Place
The last issue brings us to the relationship between space, territory,

and state. One difficulty in Laclau’s theorization is his tendency to
privilege and thus naturalize one social space, the space of the
modern nation-state, wherein the logic of hegemony is seen to be
David Howarth 115
operative. This is evident in his theoretical presuppositions about

modern sovereignty, for example, which is for the most part vested
in the territorial state, and is also present in the various examples
that are scattered throughout his writings: references to the experi-
ences of Thatcherism, Fascism, Peronism, and other populist forms.39
In an important sense this reflects the sedimentation and decontes-
tation of the “imagined community” of the nation in the contempo-
rary world, and its seemingly “natural,” though usually contested,
connection to the modern state. Indeed, historical research shows
that the modern nation-state was a political construct that once sed-
imented became a template for other groups and peoples to orga-
nize their political communities and aspirations.40
However, it is also true to say that this political articulation is
historical and contingent, and that in today’s globalizing world the
nexus among state, nation, and territory is much less tight than it
has been, or indeed ever was, in the past.41 Instead, there has been
a reactivation and reinscription of these articulations in new forms.
For one thing, the logic of globalization has resulted in a weaken-
ing of the sovereign state; brought about the construction of re-
gional formations such as the European Union; strengthened local
or subnational spaces and places of power; and has seen the over-
lapping of global, national, and local spaces in new configura-
tions.42 We have also witnessed the emergence of transnational net-
works, both of capital and labor, for instance, not to mention
international NGOs, in what commentators call the development
of a “global civil society.”43 Alongside these developments, there
has been the constitution of new global political spaces, as evident
in the formation and practices of the antiglobalization movement.
Such trends point to the ongoing need for new “mappings of
space,” which do not simply prioritize the space of the modern
nation-state, but show how this space is contested, how its bound-
aries are constantly being forged and reforged politically, and
which brings into play other spatial dimensions to provide proper
account of social practices.44
These reflections about different forms of spatiality and terri-
toriality in the contemporary world bring us to the thorny question
of physical space, and its relationship to social and political space.
The starting point here is that physical space partakes of our gen-
eral category of space. In other words, contra realists such as Andrew
Sayer, social space is not a subset of physical space, but exactly the
reverse: Physical space is a subset of any order that yields a struc-
tural regularity between objects.45 Furthermore, for purposes of
social and political analysis, physical space is always shaped and medi-
ated by a passage through the subject, even though the configuring
of physical space is not ultimately reducible to the consciousness,

experience, or discourse of the subject. In this relational concep-
tion, then, the objective measuring of the distance between points,
the peculiar shape of space, the abstract arrangement of space(s)
(what Heidegger calls “the homogenous space of Nature”) has to
be relativized, and then connected, to the subject and its practices,
and thus ultimately to particular social and political spaces.46 For
example, a subject may be deceived about the real distance of an
object (“I didn’t think it would take us so long to reach this moun-
tain”), but the real distance to the mountain is still relative to a
subject’s purposes and projections, both individual and collective.
In practice this means that symbolic and physical orders are artic-
ulated together in precise forms. That is, if we view social practices
as the particular articulation of differential elements, and one of
these elements is physical space, then social practice weaves physi-
cal space into concrete discourses or social worlds.
“Space matters” then. More precisely, however, “space means”;
or even better, its significance is relative to the projects and prac-
tices of subjects. This ontological claim implies that issues about
space, distance, speed, territoriality, and so on, and how they are to
be thought about, depend ultimately upon social and political prac-
tices. This involves, firstly, the ontological claim that the meaning,
experience, and organization of physical space is in part shaped by
political logics and practices. For example, the logic of apartheid
discourse brought about the massive restructuring of South Africa’s
social space, separating supposed “nations” or ethnicities into her-
metically sealed groups and confining them to specific territories
and “group areas.”47 Secondly, it involves the more epistemological
and methodological claim that the analysis of space has to be re-
lated to social and political practices. For instance, the claim that
large distances may hamper democracy or the building of social
networks may be verified, but its verification is only true in relation
to the latter that they matter: that is, conditions and limits to
democracy. Objective space is thus a valid object of analysis, but in
social and political theory it needs to be related to the subject and
its practices. Without this linkage, the correlations and regulations
that can be established, and the inferences that can be drawn, have
to be treated with a good deal of circumspection.
What, finally, of the relationship between space and place?
Though often viewed synonymously, I take space to be a more
abstract category than place. Using insights of the later Heidegger,
the concept of place is best understood in relation to the more
concrete practice of “dwelling,” and the latter is always relative to
the specific locations and particular things articulated within what
David Howarth 117
he calls “the Fourfold,” that is, the articulation of “the thing” in the
gathering of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities.48 In Heidegger’s
conception, classical dimensions of space, such as “interval,” “dis-
tance,” “measurement,” and so on, are simply internal components
of particular modes of disclosing things in certain locations. Places
are thus spaces with a name and an identity, and these names and
identities are shaped by a specific set of meaningful practices. Such
practices are in turn informed by a particular conception of Being:
the specific modes through which beings are disclosed in the
world. In most contemporary societies, any concretely articulated
social space will thus be composed of a variety of different types of
place, which have various and contested meanings for subjects.
They include sacred places such as churches, mosques, and syna-
gogues; commercial locations such as banks and markets; political
spaces such as parliaments, international organizations, monu-
ments, and palaces; as well as private places such as homes, clubs,
and associations. The key ethical and political questions are how
these places are related to one another; which places are permitted;
and which (if any) are not. But these questions bring us directly to
the ethical and political implications of space, and this requires a
little further conceptual clarification.
The Question of Boundaries:

“The Outside is the Inside”49
Exploring the political and ethical implications of this conception

of space involves the employment of its concepts and logics to
address a series of problems that arise from the changing spatial
circumstances of modern society. These include questions pertain-
ing to how and where the boundaries demarcating social spaces are
drawn and ought to be drawn (with respect, for instance, to trade
boundaries, to the relationships between states, or to the scope of
social justice); to the particular character of such boundaries and
frontiers, such as their degrees of porosity (and the relationship
between “inside” and “outside”); to the inner composition and nature
of the social spaces delimited by the institution of frontiers; to the
relationships between such “inner spaces” and those excesses or
surpluses that do not fit neatly into existent social spaces; and
finally to issues arising about the appropriate subjectivities that can
inhabit what I call “heteroclitic spaces.”
In engaging with these issues, I shall seek to develop a deconstruc-
tive genealogy of social space in the current conjuncture. This double
reading endeavors, first, to explain the formation and sedimentation
of political boundaries, and then, second, to analyze the dominant

logics with a view to disclosing excluded and novel possibilities in the
way space is constructed and “lived out” in our late modern world.
This requires a more precise account of social space and the rela-
tionship between social and political spaces. I begin by examining the
political construction of boundaries, seeking ways to criticize their
institution and thus to disclose new ethical and political possibilities.
Let us begin with the concept of social space and its connec-
tion to politics. At the outset, I want to stress that social spaces are
not neutral sites, but internally related to the social practices they
make possible and sustain. In other words, they are “social worlds”
that are organized around different “social logics,” where the latter
are understood as the politically contested sets of rules that govern
social practices in different sites. Thus the workplace, the univer-
sity, the family, the nation-state, or a “new world order,” are all
social worlds that crystallize a series of competing and contradic-
tory social logics. A second claim, which follows naturally from the
conception of space outlined above, is that social spaces are always
bounded, marked by the exclusionary political acts that forge
them. This is the case even if such exclusions have been concealed
because their political “origins” have been “forgotten” or sedi-
mented through the operation of ideological practices that cover
over these violent impositions. It is equally the case if the exclu-
sions are deemed legitimate because of the result of authoritative
decisions and practices, or if the boundaries are porous and not
hermetically sealed. Indeed, as I go on to show, the precise ways in
which boundaries are drawn and spaces constituted have important
ethical and normative implications.
This last claim touches upon the political construction of
space, thus bringing us directly to the relationship between social
and political spaces. In general, if social spaces are the arenas
where practices are situated and shaped, then the existence of such
spaces is engendered by the politicization and social construction
of spaces. The latter logic is predicated on the emergence of polit-
ical spaces, which are in turn brought about by the construction of
social antagonisms. As I have suggested, the creation of antagonis-
tic relations between subjects presupposes a logic of equivalence
that divides an inside from an outside, and a successful logic of
equivalence results in the establishment of political frontiers that
split social spaces into two domains. Indeed, it follows from this
claim that because the creation of any social space involves the cre-
ation of such a boundary, then the existence of an exteriority is
partly constitutive of the inside. This “constitutive outside,” as Henry
Staten calls it, means that any social space is dependent to some
David Howarth 119
extent on its excluded other for its formation and identity.50 In

short, what might be termed the politicization of social space
involves practices of putting into question and then reconfiguring
social spaces.
If the first step of my deconstructive genealogy draws attention
to the contingency and historicity disclosed by the politicization of
space, and the latter is constitutive of space itself, what alternatives
are thereby disclosed? More precisely, as against the standard pic-
ture of social space in today’s late modern world, which is divided
neatly by clear, continuous, and impermeable boundaries—embod-
ied, for instance, in the idea of state sovereignty—how can we think
of different ways to conceive the relationship between the inside
and outside? To begin with, it is important to render the dependency
between inside and outside explicit. This is true of Jacques Derrida’s
rethinking of inside and outside (“the Outside is the Inside”)
through the elaboration of various conceptual infrastructures (such
as the supplement, différance, pharmakon, instituted trace, and so
on). In so doing, Derrida seeks to capture the undecidable play
between two binary oppositions, inside and outside for instance, by
articulating the “play” between the two poles in a new theoretical
accounting. Thus an “originary supplement” for Derrida both com-
pletes a lack in the origin,while simultaneously adding something
new to the origin.51 Secondly, it is important to stress that the divi-
sions and the relationships between inside and outside are essen-
tially political, and thus contingent outcomes that could be drawn
and conceived differently. In other words, from this perspective,
the conceptualization of boundary making as a political logic
implies that such divisions could be drawn differently with altered
ethical consequences.
What, precisely, are these ethical and political implications? To
begin with, whilst the inside can be constituted through excluding
or demonizing the outside (an enemy to be demonized or a state
of anarchy to be feared) the outside is not necessarily an other,
whose otherness threatens to subvert or overflow the inside. Rather,
if the outside is acknowledged as a constitutive part of the inside,
and the other a part of the self, then we can rethink our relation to
the outside and to the other. In more specific terms, we need to
address where and how we choose to draw boundaries, which actors
are affected by drawing boundaries, as well as the character of the
boundaries so instituted. Practically, our dependence on what is “on
the other side” of the boundary, extends the scope of those affected
by our decisions about boundaries. For example, the decisions
about resolving disputes thrown up by intractably divided societies
(such as Northern Ireland, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Israel/Palestine, and
so forth) require both sides of the divide—both the political fron-

tiers within such spaces and the sedimented borders that divide
social space into delimited territorial units—to be included in the
deliberations and discussions.
These questions are not just questions about power and force,
nor purely moral questions about making the right or wrong deci-
sions, which are usually thought to be resolvable through an
abstract theory of justice. In crucial ways, they are ethical questions
about the relationship between self and other, and the connected
way we think of, and then deconstruct and reconstruct, social and
political spaces. More concretely, we need to envisage a conception
of space and identity that acknowledges and is attentive to the
claims and demands of what is outside and different. As we will see,
this requires an envisaging of blurred and porous social spaces,
and a democratic (agonistic) ethos that recognizes the interweav-
ing of self and other.52
These ethical considerations also affect how decisions ought to
be taken. Acknowledging the dependency of the inside on the out-
side, as well as the identity of self and other, can function as an
important prerequisite for renegotiating boundaries, as well as for
successfully legitimizing any redrawn boundaries. In practical terms,
this involves a recognition that affected parties on both sides of a
divide have to recognize themselves as affected parties, whose iden-
tities are mutually implicated. It also means that decisionmaking
procedures and outcomes about boundary-making ought to be
predicated on these ethical preconditions. It is no surprise that
these thoughts point in the direction of more deliberation and
consultation, across a wider range of constituencies, about ques-
tions of boundary-drawing. They can thus be seen as contributing
to growing calls for more deliberative forms of (democratic) decision-
making.53 There is, however, an important proviso: It is unlikely that
such deliberations will culminate in a form of “rational consensus”
among affected parties about boundaries, which will then bring
deliberation to an end. Instead, the assumptions of this approach
militate against the final closure of deliberation, precisely because
the drawing of boundaries is, necessarily, an ongoing political and
thus contingent social practice.
Finally, we need to consider the implications of these consider-
ations for conceptualizing and institutionalizing boundaries them-
selves. As I have suggested, classical and modernist conceptions of
boundaries tended to represent them as absolute and impermeable.
In Hobbes’s Leviathan, for instance, power and authority are vested
in an absolute sovereign, who (or which) presides over a clearly
demarcated territory with “hard” and fixed spatial boundaries. Of
David Howarth 121
course, these frontiers are not absolutely impermeable, as Hobbes

tolerates trade links as well as exchanges of people, information,
and goods between sovereign states.54 Indeed, it is precisely this
porosity that needs to be expanded upon in what is termed our
postmodern condition, emphasizing the fissures and gaps that
inhere in the borders separating social spaces (whether under-
stood as modern nation-states or other spaces more generally).
Further, we need to emphasize the multiple boundaries that
encircle subjects in most parts of the world today, a series of con-
centric and overlapping circles to which we are attached or owe
obligations with differing degrees of force. It is by now common-
place to acknowledge that subjects have multiple identities, being
defined or defining themselves by their nationality, ethnicity, re-
gion, religious affiliation, cultural attachments, sexual orientation,
and so on. But it is also true that modern citizens are subject to var-
ious and often overlapping juridical and political orders, with a
result that their claims and representations involve the traversing
of numerous boundaries and frontiers. Consider, for example, the
case of enduring conflict in Northern Ireland. One possible way of
reconciling opposed communities here is to reconsider the draw-
ing of boundaries between Northern Ireland and the Republic of
Ireland in the context of a European project that diverges from the
standard model of the modern, territorial nation-state. Such a
redrawing ought to involve the possibility of porous boundaries
that allow for, and indeed foster, multiple political, juridical, and
cultural allegiances.
The Internal Composition of Social Space
Having examined questions surrounding the institution and char-

acter of boundaries, I now turn to the internal composition of
social space and its implications for ethical and normative matters.
To begin with, the approach adopted here is opposed to a homoge-
nous concept of social space, which is characteristic of certain
forms of communitarian thought. Here we have the idea of social
space being grounded upon, or at least aspiring toward, a substan-
tive conception of the good. And the obvious problem here is the
plurality of ways of living, which do not cohere into a single concep-
tion of the good life. Even more so, we have a denial of the plurality
of (mostly) overlapping social spaces within which subjects find
themselves today. However, while accepting the contemporary “fact
of pluralism,” the approach adopted here does not accept the essen-
tially liberal idea that social space is composed of pure multiples or
disaggregated individuals, divided between the public and the pri-

vate, whose overall regulation requires an independent conception
of justice accepted by all. Such a conception denies the existence
of different and overlapping social spaces, and stands against the
idea of politics as the ongoing construction and dissolution of
social spaces. Lastly, I would oppose the idea of a fully opaque
social space, grounded systematically on a form of illusion or false
consciousness, that can be completely overturned and thus eman-
cipated. This grand dialectic is characteristic of Marxist theories of
space and suffers not only from the denial of plurality and hetero-
geneity, but also from the idea of a fully constituted space, whether
systematically misleading or transparent.
Instead, at least in our late modern world, we need to accept
that social spaces are internally heterogeneous, that is, they are
ontologically “lacking,” marked by absence, which means also that
they are thus essentially plural and internally diverse. And this is so
even if such heterogeneity is temporarily concealed or covered over
by ideology or the fantasy of wholeness. Secondly, as Massey sug-
gests, especially in the age of globalization, social spaces are multi-
layered and can be articulated together by different political prac-
tices around various nodal points.55 Once again, poststructuralist
thinkers like Derrida and Jacques Lacan, provide us with the con-
ceptual means to conceptualize such spaces. In his deconstructive
readings, for example, Derrida is at pains to detail the gaps, fissures,
and aporias residing within Western philosophical tradition. He
shows that the apparently most coherent and consistently argued
texts are replete with points of undecidability, which are concealed
and displaced with rhetorical figures and textual ruses. And Lacan,
for his part, posits the existence of a real register that continually
prevents the full constitution of a “symbolic order,” with the result
that any ordering is ontologically incomplete.
Working with the notion of a fissured philosophical text, which
for Derrida is applicable to all systems of signification, or Lacan’s
account of the existence of something that escapes all representa-
tion, it is not fanciful to harbor the idea that social spaces are
inherently lacking and riven with gaps. In order to flesh out this
idea, we need to think of political and social spaces as “places of het-
erotopia,” that is, as spaces of multiplicity and heterogeneity. Michel
Foucault’s discussion of “contradictory” spaces is helpful in address-
ing this aspect of social space. These are spaces that “have the curious
property of being in relation with all the others, but in such a way as
to suspend, neutralize, or invert the set of relationships designed,
reflected, or mirrored by themselves.”56 Foucault distinguishes in this
regard between utopian and heterotopian configurations, where the
David Howarth 123
former are “unreal” spaces “which have a general relation of direct

or inverse analogy with the real space of society” as “they represent
society itself brought to perfection, or its reverse.” Heterotopias, by
contrast, “constitute a sort of counter-arrangement, of effectively
realized utopia, in which all the real arrangements . . . that can be
found within society, are at one and the same time represented,
challenged and overturned: a sort of place that lies outside all
places and yet is actually localizable.”57
The concept of heterotopia goes back to The Order of Things,
where Foucault talks of a kind of “disorder in which fragments of
a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimen-
sion, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite.” And the latter
word, he argues, “should be taken in its most literal, etymological
sense: in such a state, things are “laid,” “placed,” “arranged” in sites
so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a
place of resistance for them, to define a common locus beneath them
all.”58 In its later, more sociological form this “enigmatic multiplic-
ity” of language and discourse is seen to represent the “juxtaposing
in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are themselves
incompatible.”59 Indeed, Foucault goes further to delineate “crisis
heterotopias” and “deviant heterotopias,” where the former are
“privileged or sacred or forbidden places that are reserved for the
individual who finds himself in a state of crisis with respect to the
society or environment in which he lives” (such as boarding school
and military service), while the latter are “occupied by individuals
whose behaviour deviates from the current average or standard”
(as with rest homes, psychiatric clinics, prisons, and cemeteries).60
Kohn builds upon David Harvey’s critique of Foucault’s notion
to put forward the concept of a “heterotopia of resistance.”61 The
latter constitutes “a real countersite that inverts and contests exist-
ing economic or social hierarchies,” whose “function is social trans-
formation rather than escapism, containment, or denial,” and thus
forms “an important locus of struggle against normalization.”62
However, while this idea captures one dimension of the politiciza-
tion of space, the contestation of social domination, we also need
to conceive of such spaces as sites of lack and multiplicity: what we
might name “heterotopias of becoming.” Such spaces would in-
volve a rethinking of the relations between social spaces (the bound-
aries between inside and outside, say in the field of immigration or
migration) as well as a transfiguration of their internal composition so
that multiplicity and internal difference are encouraged and accom-
modated. It should be stressed that while issues such as immigration,
migration, and the appropriate territorial lines of inclusion/exclu-
sion for democratic orders are important in this regard, the question
is not restricted to these more physical manifestations but includes

all forms of (symbolic) boundary drawing within and between social
spaces. Needless to say, such rethinking unfolds myriad questions.
How are we to “keep open” our relations to the external other? How
can we conceptualize and construct porous boundaries between
spaces? How can we foster internal difference? When, if ever, are cer-
tain closures legitimate? When, if ever, are interventions across
boundaries justified?
These questions highlight the way we need to think about het-
erotopias if they are not to remain “countersites,” mere inversions
of power and domination, but also to embody heterogeneity in
their materiality. In other words, if they are to be conceived as
places of multiplicity, whose subjects not only tolerate difference
but actively foster and embrace new forms of plurality. In so doing
it might be possible to imagine a new poststructuralist or post-
Heideggerian form of cosmopolitanism that resists a sharp opposi-
tion between a thick particularism and a vapid, yet potentially
vicious, universalism. As Kathleen Arnold has suggested, such a pic-
ture implies “an agonistic form of patriotism that allows for multi-
ple manifestations and attachments. This includes love for one’s
home, neighbourhood, and city and thus, the original meaning of
patria.”63 It is to the form of subjectivity that could populate such a
space that I now turn.
Heterogeneous Subjectivity
It is beyond the scope of this article to set out the necessary and
sufficient conditions for the realization of such (cosmopolitan)
spaces, let alone enumerate the various normative criteria for their
identification. Instead, I want to conclude by focusing on one
important condition for their construction, which is to envisage
and then embody a form of subjectivity that is compatible with,
and indeed engenders, such heterogeneity. How are we to conceive
a subject that can respond positively and actively to difference and
multiplicity, but can do so without falling either into a cynical indif-
ference (mere tolerance of the other, for instance) or into a retreat
from political engagement altogether? How can we articulate an
active politics of decision and action, with the possibility of “letting
go” and releasing towards difference?
Michael Walzer suggests one possible response to these ques-
tions, when he distinguishes between a “thick” and “thin” self, both
of which are rooted in the idea of a “divided self.” He argues that
one manifestation of this differentiation is that the “self speaks with
David Howarth 125
more than one moral voice,” and is thus capable “of self-criticism
and prone to doubt, anguish and uncertainty.”64 In explicating the
latter, Walzer contrasts different modalities of self-criticism (and
indeed of the self) with a view to establishing a “fit” between the lat-
ter and his advocacy of radical pluralism and complex equality.65
More particularly, he contrasts what might be termed thin and thick
models of self-criticism, where the former, evident in (Freud’s con-
ception of) psychoanalysis and (Western) philosophical reflection,
suggest “a simple linear and hierarchical arrangement of the self,
with a single critical ‘I’ at the top and a single line of criticism.”66
However, although these models do to some extent capture the feel-
ings of guilt in cases of obvious transgression, when we commit a
clear wrong for instance, “they are most plausible and persuasive
when they represent our minimalist morality.”67 This is because they
miss our instinctive and immediate critical responses, untutored by
rational reflection, as well as “those moments of doubt and division
when it is radically unclear which part is our best part, which roles,
identities, or values are fundamental,” the “hierarchical view re-
quires a thick, pluralist, and democratic correction.”68
Walzer thus advocates a thick mode of self-criticism that is
accepting of a deep and perhaps irreducible plurality of values,
competing drives, and self-critics in the self (which in turn makes
possible and feasible his project of complex equality). In this
model, where the self is the continuous “subject and object of self-
criticism,” “I am not, nor is any one of my self-critics, the sovereign
director of these critical wars. The critics that crowd around, speak-
ing for different values, representing different roles and identities
have not been chosen by me. They are me but this ‘me’ is socially as
well as personally constructed; it is a complex, maximalist whole.”69
And rather than the self, perhaps with the help of the analyst or a
philosophical consciousness, seeking to impose a single rational
solution on these competing drives and internal conflicts, thus
removing the sources of discomfort and restoring order, Walzer
proposes a solution without linearity and hierarchy. Instead,
The order of the self is better imagined as a thickly populated cir-

cle, with me in the centre surrounded by my self-critics who stand
at different temporal and spatial removes (but don’t necessarily
stand still). Insofar as I am receptive to criticism, ready for (a lit-
tle) castigation, I try to draw some of the critics closer, so that I
am immediately aware of their criticism; or I simply incorporate
them, so that they become my intimate worriers, and I become a
worried self. . . . My inner world is full of givens, too, culturally
bestowed or socially imposed—I manoeuvre among them insofar
as their plurality allows for the manoeuvring. My larger self, my
worried self, is constituted and self-constituted by the sum of

them all. I am the whole circle and also its embattled centre.70
Divided, riven with conflicts, doubts, and self-criticism, but not

utterly fragmented, as Walzer retains the idea of the self “as an
agent capable of manoeuvring among [its] constituent parts”: a
kind of constant juggling and negotiation between various forces
and inclinations.71 This is because “at its centre, the self is what it
is, ‘perdurable,’ as Lionel Trilling liked to say, though its configu-
ration changes over the course of its endurance.”72
However, there is a difficulty with this conception: either the
subject is constantly pulled and pushed in different directions, a
victim of discrete and yet incompatible empirical forces, or it is a
sovereign agency capable of imposing direction on these incom-
mensurable impulses. This suggests a clear split between the sub-
ject as “substance” and the subject as a dispersed position within
the ensemble of social relations. But what if this is a false opposi-
tion, and that ontologically speaking the subject is nothing but a
void, an empty space or rift, only rendered visible under conditions
of dislocation? And, even more so, what if its consequent identifi-
cations leave it constantly exposed to the possibility of self-trans-
gression, where the subject’s self-identifications leave it confronting
not only competing and conflicting ideals but also the prospect that
its pursuit of an ideal engenders its own self-transgression, as it is
the latter that procures subjective “surplus enjoyment”?73 And if this
is the case, as I believe it is, then we need a conception of the
“divided subject” as an ontological, rather than ontical fact, where
both aspects are rooted in the failures and ruptures of the symbolic
order wherein we attain our identity.
Such a conception radicalizes Walzer’s portrayal of the super-
ego as the “internal representative of moral value” by furthering its
function as the genesis of subjective enjoyment.74 However, it also
requires a rethinking of an alternative ethics grounded on a dif-
ferent conception of enjoyment. It is here that the work of Hei-
degger, Lacan, Laclau, and Z̆iz̆ek assumes center stage, for it is the
harnessing of “an ethics of the real,” facing up to the nothingness
or gap that resides in being, alongside a project for radical democ-
racy, that enables us to envisage the requisite subject of hetero-
geneity. More concretely, it is in a fidelity to the lack in the sym-
bolic order, to the intrinsically flawed big other wherein we attain
our identity, that an experience of decentering and contingency
can come into play, and which can in turn help us foster a trans-
formed relationship to difference and otherness. As Z̆iz̆ek neatly
puts it, “There is ethics—that is to say, an injunction that cannot be
David Howarth 127
grounded in ontology—insofar as there is a crack in the ontological

edifice of the universe: at its most elementary, ethics designates
fidelity to this crack.”75 Thus it is a fidelity to the void in the other,
and importantly to the contingency of “the Thing” that covers over
this lack (thus conferring identity), that provides a bridgehead to
the other, a bridgehead that neither reduces the other to the same
in us (whether understood in universal terms or not) nor which
treats the other with a mutual indifference that is “merely different”
from us. In this sense, the “ungrounded ground” for coming to
terms with difference and otherness is an acknowledgment of the
contingency of “the Thing” that holds us fast: the objects and dis-
courses that make us the particular subjects we are.76 More fully, it
entails a “traversing of the fundamental fantasy” (la traverseé du fan-
tasme), which in Z̆iz̆ek’s words involves the subject gaining a “mini-
mum of distance from the fantasmatic frame that organises [its]
enjoyment,” and thereby learning “how to suspend its efficiency.”77
The starting point here is an insistence that while the subject is
“thrown” or contingent, marked in any set of social relations by an
identification with a Thing that forever escapes it, this does not
necessarily result in forms of nihilism, or political “quietism” and
resignation. Instead, subjects of finitude are made responsible for
their actions and being-in-the-world—they must act and co-exist
together in social spaces not of their choosing—even though these
actions cannot be grounded in a positive and sedimented system of
norms and values.78 In short, far from simple norm-making or the
modification of inherited codes and practices, an ethics of the real
usually consists in norm-breaking and the charting of new paths,
which involves discursive shifts and new identifications.79
This conception of ethics, however, has to be connected to the
project of a radical democracy and its twin demands for equality
and freedom via the logic of equivalence. More precisely, it has to
be articulated with a project that can embrace liberal commitments
to rights, the rule of law, and various democratic procedures, while
also encouraging a “politics of becoming” that is responsive to new
forms of subjectivity and to difference. Moreover, both need to be
linked to a commitment to a conception of equality that challenges
structural inequalities and traditional hierarchies. As I have
argued, the commitment to an ethics of the real and to a project
for radical democracy is intimately bound up with the kinds of
social and political space in which they are practiced, and to the
sort of subjectivity that exists or has to be constructed. To use
Walzer’s language, the former “requires a thickly differentiated
society in which to express my different capacities and talents, my
different sense of who I am.”80 It goes without saying that a radical
democracy requires such differentiation and plurality, though it

should consist of a rich set of (at times) overlapping and hetero-
geneous spaces and spheres (as opposed to the “separated spheres”
Walzer sometimes calls for).81 As I have argued, the latter involves
an articulation of what we might call “the subject of decision” and
“the subject of releasement.”
The latter articulation raises a final question about the poten-
tial contradiction between these two dimensions of a radical demo-
cratic subjectivity. Is there a fundamental incompatibility or ten-
sion between “act” and “letting go,” which I have stressed as two
important aspects of radical democratic subjectivity? The answer
here is affirmative, though the relationship should be understood
as a tension, which is not irresoluble. To begin with, it is important
to stress that both aspects are “grounded” in contingency, although
they capture different sorts of response to contingency. The
moment of act is predicated on the ultimate failure of any objec-
tivity and the need nevertheless to act, while the moment of re-
leasement is built upon the acknowledgment of contingency and
decenteredness. Nevertheless, the latter still requires some act to
forego a completely centered relation to “the Thing” that holds us
fast. In this last respect, the key move for a current of contempo-
rary political theory is to conceive of a linkage between act and
releasement that can contain both dimensions without reducing
one to the other—a logic of difference that is not mere trans-
formism or containment but which is dynamic and open. And it is
here that the various projects for “agonistic respect” or “agonistic
pluralism” find their full value and significance.82 For it is in the
dialectic of “passionate identification” and “mutual responsiveness”
that a radical democratic politics, which can cater both for act and
releasement, is possible.
Conclusion
In explaining, justifying, and criticizing social practices, a number

of theorists allege that existing theory neglects the spatial dimen-
sion of social phenomena, and they endeavor to develop a “spatial
heuristic” to interrogate the social world. However, while space is
important in contemporary social and political theory, we need to
be skeptical about the more exaggerated claims of a free-standing
theory of space. Indeed, despite the growing interest, the category
of space remains for the most part undertheorized and conceptu-
ally indeterminate. This article has drawn on the work of Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, and Ernesto Laclau,
David Howarth 129
to develop a distinctive approach to the question of space in social

and political theory. I take space to be an order of representation
that exhibits a structural regularity between objects, and spatializa-
tion to refer to the logic of representing or making visible objects,
which (partially) fixes the meaning of their essentially contingent
character. Social and political spaces are a specific subset of space
and spatialization in general.
More concretely, social spaces are socially constructed rather
than simply given or conceded an independently constitutive role.
Equally, however, this ontological starting point is checked by the
fact that social spaces are marked by a fundamental impossibility
that prevents their full constitution. In other words, instead of
totalizing and homogenous entities, social spaces are essentially
heterogeneous constructs, which are internally split or lacking.
The latter fact opens the ways for stressing the primacy of political
logics in explaining the construction and character of social space.
This has required the development of two related dimensions of
the concept of politics. These are, first, a logic of contesting and
constituting social relations (what has been deemed “the institu-
tion of the social”) through the logics of equivalence and differ-
ence, and, second, a logic of responding to and mediating the con-
flictual dimension inherent in the constitution of social relations,
both of which involve a conception of political subjectivity and a
distinctive theorization of social space.
As I have also argued, this approach carries important ethical
and normative implications. On the one hand, the stress on the
politicization of social space discloses the need to acknowledge,
and to think through the consequences of, the relation of depen-
dence between the interiority and exteriority of any political divi-
sion of social space. On the other hand, by drawing attention to
the ontological heterogeneity of social spaces, and by stressing the
idea of politics as a releasement toward things and others, I have
endeavored to begin the normative, or, perhaps better, the utopian,
task of critically rethinking the future construction of social spaces
in what we too glibly call our globalizing world. More positively, I
call for the envisaging and creation of “spaces of heterogeneity”
that are both compatible with radical democratic demands for
equality, as well as a “politics of becoming.” This forms the basis of
a poststructuralist conception of cosmopolitanism.
And, finally, I have argued that this vision of cosmopolitanism,
which both recognizes particularities and the always incomplete
and contingent character of any worthwhile universality, requires
a rethinking of political subjectivity. Working through Michael
Walzer’s idea of a “thick self” using insights from poststructuralist
thinkers like Lacan and Z̆iz̆ek, this involves the idea of a split or
divided subject, which is “grounded” ultimately on the idea of the
void that is constitutive of any social space. What I call “heteroge-
neous subjectivity” consists of acknowledging the hold or grip of
“the Thing” or object that turns individuals subjects—that makes
them the subjects they are—and then coming to terms with such
identifications. An ethical subject in this conception involves a
releasement or “letting go” towards others, but such a relation is in
turn predicated on the mutual recognition of the ontological or
generalized character of such subjective identifications.
Notes
My thanks to Jason Glynos, Steven Griggs, Sheldon Leader, Aletta Norval,

Rob Walker, and Albert Weale for their helpful comments and thoughts on
earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank members of the Doc-
toral Seminar in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of
Essex, especially Peter Bloom and Sam Dallyn, for their acute reflections
and criticisms of this article.
1. This epigraph is taken from David Hume’s essay “Of the Original
Contract,” in his Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
p. 279.
2. I develop this example from Jeff Malpas, “Uncovering the Space of
Disclosedness,” in Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, eds., Heidegger, Authen-
ticity and Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 225.
3. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 539.
4. David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (London: Verso, 1999); Bob Jes-
sop, “Spatial Fixes, Temporal Fixes, and Spatio-Temporal Fixes,” published
by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster, Lancaster
University at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/soiology/papers/jessop-spatio-
temporal-fixes.pdf; Alain Lipietz, “The Structuration of Space, the Prob-
lem of Land and Spatial Policy,” in John Carney et al., eds., Regions in Cri-
sis (London: Croom Helm, 1980).
5. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question (London: Edward Arnold,
1977); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1991); Jean Lojkine, “Big Firms’ Strategies Urban Policy and Urban Social
Movements,” in Michael Harloe, ed., Captive Cities (London: John Wiley,
1977).
6. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2d ed. (London: Verso,
1991).
7. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 19, 15.
8. Margaret Kohn, Radical Space (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2003).
9. Lefebvre, note 5, p. 341.
10. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard
University, 2000); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York:
Penguin Press, 2004).
11. See, respectively, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), p. 185; Jeff Young, “What Is
David Howarth 131
Dwelling? The Homelessness of Modernity and the Worlding of the

World,” in Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, eds., Heidegger, Authenticity and
Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 173; Kohn, note 8, pp. 6, 93;
Hardt and Negri, Empire, note 10, p. 45; Hannah Arendt, On Revolution
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 257; Anthony Giddens, Beyond
Left and Right (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1994), pp. 130–131.
12. Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labour (London: Macmillan,
1984), p. 53. My emphasis.
13. Doreen Massey, “Politics and Space-Time,” New Left Review 196
(1992): 84.
14. Edward Soja, “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic,” Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 70 (1980): 208.
15. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Cambridge, MA:
Polity, 1984), p. 368. My emphasis.
16. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000), p. 15.
17. Peter Saunders, Social Theory and the Urban Question, 2d ed. (Lon-
don: Unwin Hyman, 1986), p. 277.
18. See Michael De Certeau, The Practice of Ever yday Life (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984); Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, Or,
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1991); Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (Lon-
don: Verso, 1990); R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as
Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
19. Kohn, note 8, pp. 3–4. My emphasis.
20. Ibid., p. 155.
21. Ibid., p. 4.
22. Ibid., pp. 7, 153, 156. My emphasis.
23. Ibid., pp. 4, 90.
24. See Max Jammer, Concepts of Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1969).
25. Kohn, note 8, pp. 6–7.
26. See David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 102.
27. This is the case with certain Deleuzian critiques of space, where the
latter is depicted in purely negative terms. See Nathan Widder, “What’s Lack-
ing in the Lack: A Comment on the Virtual,” Angelaki 3 (2000):117–138.
28. Laclau, note 18, p. 41.
29. Ibid.
30. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962),
pp. 31–35; see Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time (London:
Routledge, 1996), p. 4.
32. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan,
1992), p. 533).
33. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Brighton: Harvester Press,
1982), pp. 309–330.
35. Derrida, note 33, p. 13.
36. Ibid.
37. Laclau and Mouffe, note 11, pp. 127–134.
38. There is a fourth aspect here, which is implicit in this general pic-
ture, but which I shall not examine in detail. It involves the prevention of
“dislocation” being registered or rendered visible as a dislocation at all, a

situation that approximates what might be termed “structural power,” or
what Lukes terms the “third face of power.” See Steven Lukes, Power: A
Radical View, 2d ed. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005). This idea is developed
in Jason Glynos and David Howarth, Theory, Method and Critique in Social
Science: Logics of Critical Explanation (London: Routledge, 2007).
39. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005).
40. Anderson, note 6.
41. Simon Dalby, “Political Space: Autonomy, Liberalism, and Empire,”
Alternatives 30, no. 4 (2005): 415–441; John Ruggie, “Territoriality and Be-
yond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International
Organization 47, no. 1 (1993): 139–174.
42. Massey, note 7.
43. David Held, “Democracy and the New International Order,” in
Daniele Archibugi and Held, eds., Cosmopolitan Democracy (Cambridge, MA:
Polity Press, 1995); Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society (Cambridge, MA: Polity
Press, 2003).
44. Harvey, note 26, pp. 111–112.
45. Andrew Sayer, Realism and Social Science (London: Sage, 2000), pp.
108–130.
46. Martin Heidegger, note 30, p. 147.
47. See Aletta Norval, Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse (London: Verso,
1996); Jennifer Robinson, The Power of Apartheid: State, Power and Space in
South African Cities (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996).
48. Martin Heidegger, Poetr y, Language, Thought (New York: Harper
and Row, 1975), p. 156.
49. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976),
p. 44.
50. Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1984).
51. In a similar vein, Jacques Lacan uses topological figures to recon-
ceptualize the relationship between inside and outside, showing the inex-
tricable linking of orders and structures rather than their simple separa-
tion. A clear instantiation of this is the modeling of the relationship
between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary orders as a Borromean
knot, which resists any simple division between the three registers that
make-up the human subject. Instead, there is a relational linkage between
the three registers, and it is their interaction that produces concrete
effects.
52. See William Connolly, Pluralism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005).
53. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy?
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
54. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968),
p. 295.
55. Massey, note 7, pp. 172–176; see also Chantal Mouffe, On the Polit-
ical (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 114.
56. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in
Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 352.
57. Ibid., p. 352.
58. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), pp. xvii–xviii.
David Howarth 133
59. Foucault, note 56, p. 354; see Kevin Hetherington, The Badlands of
Modernity (London: Routledge, 1997); Harvey, note 15, p. 184.
60. Foucault, note 56, p. 353.
61. Harvey, note 16.
62. Kohn, note 8, p. 91.
63. Kathleen Arnold, Homelessness, Citizenship, and Identity (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 147.
64. Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1994), p. 85.
65. Ibid., p. 101. The argument for complex equality is developed in
Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
66. Walzer, note 64, p. 91.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid., p. 92.
69. Ibid., pp. 86, 96.
70. Ibid., pp. 98–99.
71. Ibid., p. 100.
72. Ibid., p. 101.
73. Jason Glynos, “Self-transgression and Freedom,” Critical Review of
International Social and Political Philosophy 6, no. 2 (2003): 1–20; Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek,
For They Know Not What They Do (London: Verso, 1991).
74. Walzer, note 59, p. 88.
75. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), p. 214.
76. I draw inspiration here from Rudi Visker’s seminal readings of
Heidegger, Foucault, and Levinas. See Rudi Visker, Truth and Singularity
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999).
77. Z̆iz̆ek cited in Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political (London:
Routledge, 1999), p. 109. In the language of Heidegger, this approach taps
into his different ways of relating to, and coming to terms with, the noth-
ingness or contingency at the heart of Being. In Being and Time nothing-
ness is met with the idea of an authentic resolution and decision in the
face of an all-pervasive nihilism, whereas in his later writings the negotia-
tion of nothingness consists of a “releasement towards things” and an
ethos of “dwelling,” which is predicated on a transcendence into the plen-
itude of Being. Both are, nevertheless, expressions of the ultimate contin-
gency at the heart of our experience of Being and may be seen to repre-
sent different modalities of our negotiation of absence. In Being and Time,
to be human is nothing else but to experience the “da” of “sein”—the
“there” of “Being”: its “thrownness” or “facticity”—and it is only through
its attachments to something, and its “being-held” so, that the “da” can
turn into something approximating a subject (even though Heidegger
avoids the latter because of its Cartesian and transcendental connota-
tions). See David Howarth, “Towards a Heideggerian Social Science: Hei-
degger, Kisiel and Wiener on the Limits of Anthropological Discourse,”
Anthropological Theory 4, no. 2 (2004): 229–247.
78. See Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991),
pp. 154–169.
79. Glyn Daly, “Introduction: Risking the Impossible, in Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek
and Glyn Daly, eds., Conversations with Z̆iz̆ek (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2004),
pp. 18–19.
80. Walzer, note 64, p. 102.
81. Ibid.
82. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest,” in Keith Ansell Pear-

son and Duncan Large, eds., The Nietzsche Reader (Oxford: Blackwell,
2006), pp. 95–100; William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1991); Mouffe, note 55.

Space, Subjectivity, and Politics

Transféré par

Informations du document

Description originale:

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Space, Subjectivity, and Politics

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Alternatives 31 (2006), 105–134

Space, Subjectivity, and Politics

This article questions the more exaggerated claims of a free-

The face of the earth is continually changing, by the increase

It is widely acknowledged that our conceptions and experiences of

*Department of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK, C04 3SQ.

though the source of the former might be many thousands of miles

Benedict Anderson incorporates spatial dimensions of analysis into

implications of this conception by addressing a series of pressing

(How) Does Space Matter?

Let me begin with two opposed accounts of space. On the one

Geography matters in both its senses, of distance/nearness/

In a later exchange with Laclau she goes on to claim that “Spatial

Much is said in Kohn’s work, for instance, about the relationship

are central to our understanding of contemporary politics. Equally,

I begin with Ernesto Laclau’s attempt to develop a notion of space

Through the game the child symbolizes the absence of the

order and disruption that we can specify the relationship between

structure.”34 Again, however, such repetitions are always related to

contrasting elements. In other words, to use Wittgenstein’s termi-

Physical Space, Territory, and Place

The last issue brings us to the relationship between space, territory,

operative. This is evident in his theoretical presuppositions about

of physical space is not ultimately reducible to the consciousness,

The Question of Boundaries:

Exploring the political and ethical implications of this conception

of political boundaries, and then, second, to analyze the dominant

extent on its excluded other for its formation and identity.50 In

so forth) require both sides of the divide—both the political fron-

course, these frontiers are not absolutely impermeable, as Hobbes

The Internal Composition of Social Space

Having examined questions surrounding the institution and char-

disaggregated individuals, divided between the public and the pri-

former are “unreal” spaces “which have a general relation of direct

is not restricted to these more physical manifestations but includes

The order of the self is better imagined as a thickly populated cir-

worried self, is constituted and self-constituted by the sum of

Divided, riven with conflicts, doubts, and self-criticism, but not

grounded in ontology—insofar as there is a crack in the ontological

democracy requires such differentiation and plurality, though it

In explaining, justifying, and criticizing social practices, a number

to develop a distinctive approach to the question of space in social

My thanks to Jason Glynos, Steven Griggs, Sheldon Leader, Aletta Norval,

Dwelling? The Homelessness of Modernity and the Worlding of the

“dislocation” being registered or rendered visible as a dislocation at all, a

82. See Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer’s Contest,” in Keith Ansell Pear-

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi