Article published in the «Diacritics» — 2003 — Vol. 33 — No. 3/4 (New Coordinates: Spatial Mappings, National Trajectories(Autumn) — pp. 188-203.
In 1974 Henri Lefebvre published La production de I'espace (The Production of Space), a study said to have changed the course of critical reflection on the world around us. In his copious work Lefebvre locates the gaps and rifts between spatial practices or representational spaces and representations of space in order to mark the brute nature of social contradiction. Over history, he shows, those individuals who practice and represent space generally own control over those who do not or cannot. The very history of the reception of Lefebvre's work has been so rich that it cannot be disentangled from debates concerning the nature of the postmodern condition. It has brought forward an element, something akin to Lacan's "real," that cannot be contained or discerned by language, the arena of life itself. The impact of La production de Vespace cannot be underestimated.1 Yet, at the same time, the work remains a legacy or a point of refer- ence for a concurrent labor born at the same moment and of a different texture than Lefebvre's: an activity that I would like to call a writing of space, a labor by which authors of different formation engage and invent alternative or other spaces within the texture of their own reflections on space. Like Lefebvre, they respond to a anxiety about the condition of space in which they live, but unlike him, they embody, in the gist of their own writing, spaces alternative to those in which they live. What follows is thus aimed at discerning why and how space emerged in the field of critical theory when it did and, in turn, at showing how the reflections remain crucial for critical practice here and now.
