It is difficult to make the connection between a square of wild grass growing in between two railroad tracks and … God, or his absence, or his substitutes. And yet that’s where it starts, with a sort of revolt that is like a childish, twisted drive. The refusal—how to put it—of “that” appearing before the tribunal of efficacy and meaning…. The multiple, the multiple would be, yes, the disconnected part, the possibility, always on the way, of detachment, without which there would be no surprises, or even anything to come. Along the lines of “dormancy,” such a beautiful word that has to do with seeds, we might try something like “comancy,” which would definitely designate not an expectation, a movement of expectation, but on the contrary a kind of immobility of coming … a kind of permanent dis-enclosure, an example of which would be precisely the square of wild grass between the railroad tracks.
—Jean-Christophe Bailly
Space is not the name of a thing, but of that outside of things thanks to which their distinctness is granted them. Things could not be distinct in nature if they did not also occupy distinct places. If I am taking the tree’s place (and not just “replacing it”), there is neither tree nor human being, but something else: a sylvan divinity, for example. When the distinction of place is hindered or rejected, a crushing, a constriction, and a suffocation is produced. That is what we can see in those geological folds and contractions out of which come igneous fusions, conglomerates, and pudding-stones, which in turn produce new types of rock—new, distinct elements in a new distribution of places and a different spatial configuration. We can also see it when an excess of plant growth strangles some and conjoins others, weaving them into a braid, like twin trunks that sometimes intertwine with one another to the point of strangulation, growing, neither one nor two, within that embrace.
Space is a placing, and in order to accomplish this, a distribution, therefore a spacing of places, before being a distance. The spacing can be minuscule as well as immense: that does not affect its nature. It consists in the thrust of separation thanks to which “that” is distinguished, and “that” distinguishes this from that. It is the time of that thrust. This time is not the flow of the successive above the already configured spaces of the permanent. On the contrary, it forms the pace of configuration itself according to its configuring urge.
Hence this paradox of time, which is to be simultaneously pure succession and pure permanence, according to the pulsation of one in the other. Thus, even when nothing new happens, it still happens that the distinction is maintained and things do not collapse into one another. The separation and distinction of all things is not a banal, de facto given. It forms, on the contrary, the gift, the giving of things itself. It is the permanent eclosure of the world. There cannot be one sole thing that does not have a separation between itself and something else. Therefore there cannot be fewer than two things. The one-sole is its immediate negation, and space-time constitutes the structure of that negation.
That is why the “conquest of space” cannot be considered in the same way as the discovery of preexistent places. One does not discover what was previously covered up, or at least one does not just discover but one opens up as well, separating and distinguishing. Space is not conquered without space conquering its conquerors as well.
Undoubtedly, the cosmic expanses both within and without our solar system existed before our rockets, probes, and satellites were launched. But at the same time—in the very time of those launchings—the “conquest” is a moment, a scansion of the general expansion. Man not only goes far from earth, penetrating what was once another world: he also separates, in this movement, the earth from itself, and he separates himself from himself in reduplicating from the inside (if it is an “inside”) the dilation of the universe. Space spreads itself out through man, whom it in turn spreads out.
When the European discovered the “New World,” he engaged in an expansion in which a new world was shaped and new distinctions settled into place. A new Indies separated off from the known Indies. In the space of a century (as they say) the face of the world was changed—continents, islands, and oceans. Today, in the space of less than half a century, the configuration of that world, whose space-time is becoming that of the transmission of satellite signals, has been transformed. In a sense it is the dissolution or a dissipation of the space of clear topographical distinctions, of the space of territories and boundaries, of domains and enclosures. The space of separations is yielding to the thrust of a spatiality that separates the separations from themselves, that seizes the general configuration, in order simultaneously to spread it out in a continuum and to contort it into an interlacing of networks. The partes extra partes is becoming, while retaining its exteriority, a pars pro toto at the same time as a totum in partibus.
Thus what happens is the following. For the first time, the expansion or the eclosure of the world becomes identical to what was considered to be its mere instrument. The caravels of Christopher Columbus seemed to be such instruments. The vessels had not yet revealed the profound nature according to which they are always at once tools but also agents and locations of expansion. In truth, America had already begun on the bridge, in the stays and the astrolabe of the Santa Maria. A spatial vessel manifests that nature more clearly. We can see that it is itself a distinct element opening up the space around it. It is itself a world in the process of eclosing in the world, and even more in the process, if I may say so, of eclosing the world within it and around it.
Another life, another respiration, another weight, and another humanity is in the process of emerging. And consequently, what distinguishes itself today, what is in the process of spatializing itself, presents itself as spatialization itself. Faced with the “Indian” of the discovered Caribbean, we wondered: Is it another man? Is it other than man? But today we ask these questions about the discoverer of space. The one we catch a glimpse of on board our space ships—we understand that he is a variant of the same, of ourselves. In a sense, it is a return of the question: Is he another exemplar of the same, or an other than the same? But at the same time it is another question: Up to what point can the same, distinguishing itself from the same, take its sameness with it?
The eclosure of the world must be thought in its radicalness: no longer an eclosure against the background of a given world, or even against that of a given creator, but the eclosure of eclosure itself and the spacing of space itself. (In a sense, then, the word radicalness is inappropriate: it is not a question of roots, but of wide-openness.) A new departure for creation: nothing, which moves over to make a place or give occasion to something. Locations [les lieux] are delocalized and put to flight by a spacing that precedes them and only later will give rise [donnera lieu] to new places [lieux nouveaux]. Neither places, nor heavens, nor gods: for the moment it is a general dis-enclosing, more so than a burgeoning. Dis-enclosure: dismantling and disassembling of enclosed bowers, enclosures, fences. Deconstruction of property—that of man and that of the world.
Dis-enclosure confers upon eclosure a character that is close to explosion, and spacing confines it to conflagration. Thus, for the ancient Stoics, the world was thought to follow the successive cycles of a “great year” that led from sudden upsurge to implosion, from burning to extinction, and from dilation to retraction and reabsorption before the new eclosure.
Today, the conquest of space is replaying the scenario of that mythology at an accelerated pace. Probes and telescopes accompany the expansion of the universe as far as to the nonlocalizable, where stars have been dead for immemorial light-years. The end of worlds comes back to us in the launching of our own—the end, or the absolute mystery of spacing itself, according to which there is a “world,” from that dis-enclosure that is preceded by no enclosure of being, but by which non-being is disclosed. Thus there is in the world something other than a unique point without dimensions, plunged deep into its own nullity.
The separation between bodies, the stellar remoteness, and the galactic distances send out toward the ever-receding cosmic extremities this point itself, this dust, this seed and this hole we have discovered ourselves to be, as well as this silence, which we call the big bang, whose echo haunts our voice.
Though the name Ariadne seems to have been given to the European space launcher out of a simple personal inclination, we cannot refrain from looking into the mythic resources. Ariadne creates the link between the inner, folded back, implosive space of the labyrinth and the open space of the sky, whose Corona Borealis she wears. In certain versions of the story, the light from this diadem of stars replaces the thread that was given to Theseus. It is she who makes possible the escape from the sinister enclosure and the return voyage on the vessel bucking the bitter waves full sail toward the open sea.
But in reopening space, Theseus also rekindles the ambivalence inherent in separation and distinction. He abandons Ariadne on an island, brief punctual expanse—less place than midpoint of a churning liquid labyrinth. In the infinitely repeated indecision of the myth, Ariadne pines away, exposed to both solitary languor and the unanticipated arrival of Dionysus.