Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

But we are also conscious that whatever never happened, a real encounter,
became real only on the written page. In this context, we/I have permutated
the unreal in a real place defined in the landscape of the mind. Was it then
that the contours of the Third space started to appear timidly on the horizon?
Or was mine only a kind of exercising heterotopia ,29 a desired belonging to topos
across the spatial/historical multiplicity of our time? A kind of Persian garden,
a reserve of imagination, simultaneously mythic and real, a place that “enables
me to see myself there where I am absent.” 30 Or just the illusion of invented
space calling for meeting, sharing and contamination?
One of the outcomes that appeared clearly during our wandering is
linked to our ability to cross borders and overcome rigid divisions in order to
grasp the free flow of memories without pretending that they are complete,
exhaustive. We (my imaginary Eva and I) were open to restless self-interrogation
and ready to question the certainties because we/I were/was tortured by
our/my multiple identity and belongings. Tortured and fascinated at the same
time with remembering and amnesia, with a meaning of home and inhabiting
the world, with searching for our/my place within it.
However, what I find significant – and perhaps this is the reason why
I looked for Eva Hoffman’s help – is how we inverted the concepts of loss and
strength. In some way or other, the fact that we are ‘orphans’ of country and
lack a haven, opened a new cognitive dimension and made emerge a nucleus
of new necessities: to keep an ‘extreme vigilance and alert state’, as described by
Luciana Floris ,31 interweaving loss and empowerment without any hierarchical
order, transmuting bitterness into a special strength, into irony, into energy;
all this with narrative as a powerful tool. And, as Floris emphasises, quoting
Simone Weil, in such a journey marked by dislocation, roots are unnecessary,
notwithstanding that cutting roots means cutting a vital relationship. However,
this cut, this wound, this loss is necessary. Weil admits in Cahiers de Marseille
when she escapes from France, at the time of its occupation by the Nazis,
“uprooting is necessary (...) it is necessary to go into exile from any earthly
29
The introduction of the concept “Heterotopia” in contemporary philosophy is made by Michel Foucault. See in:
Michel Foucault, “Space, Power and Knowledge”, in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London and
New York, Routledge 2006), 134-142.
30
Michel Foucault, “Des Espace Auters”, published by the French Journal Architecture/Mouvment/Continuité, October
1984. Translated into English by Jay Miskowiec and published online with the title “Of Other Spaces (1967),
Heterotopias” at http//foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html.
31
Luciana Floris, “Abitare la soglia”, in Il globale e l’intimo: luoghi del non ritorno, ed. Liana Borghi and Uta Treder
(Perugia: Morlacchi Editore, 2007), 74.
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