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.