From Time to Space

Kristeva, Foucault, and the Emergence of Space as an Intellectual Paradigm

• Kristeva's novel Les Samouraïs features a fictionalized Foucault who loves the music of words.
• The fictive Foucault paraphrases Blanchot, whose works Kristeva had in her suitcase when she arrived in Paris.
• Kristeva's one-liner mimics much of Foucault's writing in the 1960s, highlighting an area of concern common to their respective oeuvres: space.
• Kristeva's vignette indexes the manner in which time would be usurped by space as a dominant intellectual paradigm.
• Foucault recounted an anecdote about a talk he gave on "other spaces" to a group of architectural theorists in the late 1960s.
• Foucault used this recurring episode to illustrate the erstwhile hegemony of the temporal paradigm over the spatial in French academic circles until the late 1960s.
• The anecdote takes on the contours of a belligerent space of discourse, staking out a set of discursive power relations and a space of cultural capital and concomitant power.
• The combative new paradigm would occupy more and more terrain of academic discourse, dislodging the hegemony of historiography.
• The "other spaces" anecdote takes on all the attributes of a perlocutionary speech act, bringing something into being by virtue of its discursive assertion.
• The very reiteration of this anecdote contributed to cementing the persuasiveness of the new paradigm.
• The emergence of space as an intellectual paradigm was a dominant concern in both Kristeva's and Foucault's work.
• Kristeva's fictional vignette and Foucault's anecdote both reflect the shifting intellectual landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in which space emerged as a new paradigm.

Test your knowledge of the emergence of space as an intellectual paradigm with this quiz on Kristeva, Foucault, and their works. From Kristeva's novel Les Samouraïs to Foucault's anecdote about "other spaces" in a talk to architectural theorists, explore how both authors contributed to the shift from a temporal to a spatial paradigm in French academic circles in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This quiz will challenge your understanding of the key ideas