of spacetime” (466). In this sense, investigating the past through spatial practices is, first and foremost, an attempt to end the one-sided historicist emphasis on time, origin and chronology. A spatial inquiry into history, thus, is about conceiving history not in its abstract, bygone and unreachable form but as a presentable and re-liveable occasion. As Ethington states, “Placing the past takes ‘the past’ out of time, locates it in materialized topoi, and asserts that history, in any symbolic system, is the map of these topoi” (487). Consequently, this study suggests an itinerary and experiential approach to history. As Thomas Bender in his article “Theory, Experience, and the Motion of History” also states, “the centrality of human action to the meaning of history” should not be underplayed (498).
Furthermore, re-establishing history through spatial activities may well align with Foucault’s notion of genealogy. From a heterotopological view, genealogy can be observed in and as motion through space. As Maria Tamboukou in “Genealogy/Ethnography” also points out, “Foucault’s genealogies are particularly attentive to the catalytic role of space in the ways human beings construct knowledge about themselves and the world around them” (197). In his essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” as an alternative to the traditional devices ←38 | 39→for constructing a comprehensive view of history and for retracing the past as a continuous development, Foucault offers a genealogical inquiry into the past. Foucault defines genealogy as a specific type of history that challenges the pursuit of the origin or descent. In Foucault’s view, descent or origin does not mean heritage or lineage. The aim of the genealogist is not to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things, either. Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people (“Nietzsche” 81). He explicates that the search for the origin is an attempt to disinter subjugated knowledges which are “knowledges from below,” “unqualified or even disqualified knowledges,” that are “local, regional, or differential, incapable of unanimity” (“Nietzsche” 7–8). Consequently, the genealogist’s task should be, by taking a spatial approach, to identify the accidents, the minute deviations, the errors, the false appraisals and the faulty calculations that has given birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us. Ultimately, genealogical analysis reveals that heritage is not an acquisition or a possession that grows and solidifies; rather, it is “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath” (“Nietzsche” 82). Thus, Foucault asserts that a search for descent is not about building foundations: on the contrary, it is about disturbing what was previously considered immobile, unified and showing the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself. As José Medina in “Toward a Foucaultian Epistemology of Resistance” also points out, “genealogies have to be always plural, for genealogical investigations can unearth an indefinite number of paths from forgotten past struggles to the struggles of our present” (21).
Finally, the purpose of history guided by spatial itineraries and genealogical investigations is not to discover the roots, but to commit itself to the systematic dissociation of identity and its dissipation. That is, it does not seek to redefine our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return or discover a forgotten identity eager to be reborn; it seeks to make visible all those discontinuities that cross us (“Nietzsche” 94–95). A spatialized inquiry into the past also means being able to develop counter-histories. In this sense, the other times are not simply memories that are to be included in a heterogeneous collective memory; rather, as Medina indicates, they “remain counter-memories that make available multiplicitous pasts for differently constituted and positioned publics and their discursive practices” (24). The result of such an approach may, however, be one of estrangement. As Medina states while investigating history “we make past lives alien as they also make our own lives strangely unfamiliar” (28). Accordingly, “far from making ourselves free to remember or forget in whatever way seems most convenient to us, we make ourselves vulnerable to the past by opening our memories to the challenges and contestations of various subjects-the subjects in our present and in our future as ←39 | 40→well as those in the past” (28–29). Nevertheless, the spatial attempt at looking into history proves to be a progressive act because the emphasis is on the individuals’ potential ability to actively and critically compose history; to have a degree of control as regards to the re-making of the past.
1.6 Theorizing Levinas’s Ethics
This section brings into Levinas to the study because in both Auster’s heterotopias and Pamuk’s Third Spaces subjects are not perceived as autonomous selves, who embark on a spatial journey of self-invention, self-discovery or self-empowerment. It is only through the particular other person that heterotopias and Third Spaces are conceived, and it is only through the other that the subject gains a sense of ethical self. That is why this study eschews to view the urban subjects of Auster and Pamuk as flâneurs. The fact that the urban characters of both authors are always interrelated and dependent on the other provides a direct antithesis to the urban flâneur who as Priscella Parkhurst Ferguson in “The Flâneur On and Off the Streets” points out “walks through the city at random and alone, a bachelor and a widower…suspended from social obligation, disengaged, disinterested, dispassionate” (26). She further states that flânerie “requires the city and its crowds, yet the flâneur remains aloof from both” (27). Rather than strolling the streets aimlessly and keeping to themselves, Auster’s and Pamuk’s characters, on the other hand, aim at relations, contact and response-ability.
As already indicated, in this study, the de-centered nature of the subject is conducive to his becoming an ethical self. That is, the disruption of the self is not a hindrance but essential for the Auster’s and Pamuk’s subjects to open themselves to the other. As the works of Auster and Pamuk testify, in and through the heterotopian and Third Spaces, the self is frequently “face-to-face” with the other, who shakes him out of his narcissistic and solitary existence and endows him with a sense of responsive, exposed and caring sense of self. Before expanding on the relevance of Levinas’s theory to the context of this study, it is significant to outline the critical points of his conception of ethics; hence, in the following section, I will first elaborate on Levinas’s notion of the self and the other.
1.7 Levinas: Towards an Understanding of the Ethical Embodied Subject
According to Levinas, humans are first and foremost sensuous beings who exist in a sensuous world. As Lok Wing-Kai, in his dissertation, “Foucault, ←40 | 41→Levinas and the Ethical Embodied Subject” makes it clear, humans first sense and enjoy the world through their sensual body, not necessarily apprehending the world through their conscious mind (133–134). Alphonso Lingis in “The Sensuality and the Sensitivity” explains Levinas’s conception of sensibility as follows: “Sensuality is not intentionality…Steeped in the elemental, contented with the plenum, its movement is that of enjoyment…being sensual, one enjoys the light, the color, the solidity, the spring, the monsoon, and one enjoys one’s enjoyment” (223). Indeed, confined to his own environment, the sensuous subject is entirely at home with itself and takes delight in his life. Levinas writes that as a sensuous being,
I am absolutely for myself. Egoist without reference to the Other, I am alone without solitude, innocently egoist and alone. Not against the Others, not “as for me…”- but entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate-without ears, like a hungry stomach. (Totality 134)
The basic mode of life for the sensual subject is to satisfy his immediate needs such as food, warmth, shelter and pleasure. Levinas defines this phase of the subject’s life as il y a. He describes il y a as such:
There is, in general, without it mattering what there is, without our being able to fix a substantive to this term. There is is an impersonal form, like in it rains, or it is warm. Its anonymity is essential…What we call the I is itself submerged by the
