Part IV - Making Room

Summary

Within a limit, room is made—and thus place. To lack limit is to lack place, and conversely: not to be in place is to be unlimited. A limit is a positive power within which place is made.

– Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History

As Martin Heidegger famously put it in his 1959 essay ‘The Thing’: ‘All distances in time and place are shrinking […] Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness’ (Poetry, Language, Thought, 163). This observation proves true time and again in the novels examined up to now. Indeed, for Heidegger, ‘The peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by television’ (163), and we saw this borne out in the novels by Michel Houellebecq and Chloé Delaume examined in Part I. In Part II, we witnessed how the continued accelerations of globalization left Lydie Salvayre's and Jean-Philippe Toussaint's protagonists playing catch up, often feeling paranoid and out of place, alienated and inquiet [uneasy] (to use Toussaint's oft-repeated word). Finally, in the social and urban dystopias put on display by, respectively, Virginie Despentes and Philippe Vasset in Part III, ‘nearness’ in the sense of social cohesion or solidarity could be said to be the key missing feature of society, so that Heidegger's (and Paul Virilio’s) contention—that as society increasingly abolishes distances technologically, so too does it deprive itself of nearness—seems all but confirmed.

For Heidegger, in his essay ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking,’ ‘nearness’ is accomplished only when ‘room’ is made for something to ‘begin its presencing,’ and this is done only ‘within a limit’ (Poetry, 152). Indeed, when Maurice Blanchot celebrated his cosmonaut-man who had broken through the earthly limit—the ‘man with no horizon’ (Political Writings, 269)—he was responding to what he saw as Heidegger's outdated, conservative, territorial attachments. And surely limits as imposed by traditional territorial, colonial, or capitalist powers, while growing out of the same intimate impulse to have a space of one's own, have ultimately historically infringed upon and sought to appropriate that of others. However, just as in Part II Toussaint and Salvayre re-envisioned the gesture of fleeing, the authors of Part IV—Jean Rolin and Marie Darrieussecq—will reconstrue and playfully engage with forms of limits, boundaries, and edges in order to find a more meaningful, intimate, and nuanced contact—something we might call ‘nearness’—with their chosen territories.