To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other...Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.
Michel de CerteauPolitical organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places of believing practices, but for this very reason, they seem to have been haunted by the return of a very ancient (preChristian) and very โpaganโ alliance between power and religion. It is as though now that religion has ceased to be an autonomous power (the โpower of religion,โ people used to say), politics has once again become religious.
Michel de CerteauAlong with the lazy man... the dying man is the immoral man: the former, a subject that does not work; the latter, an object that no longer even makes itself available to be worked on by others.
Michel de CerteauThe walking of passers-by offers a series of turns and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures." There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path.
Michel de CerteauTo walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.
Michel de CerteauOne is a socialist because one used to be one, no longer going to demonstrations, attending meetings, sending in one's dues, in short, without paying.
Michel de CerteauThe sick man must follow his illness to the place where it is treated... He is set aside in one of the technical and secret zones (hospitals, prisons, refuse dumps) which relieve the living of everything that might hinder the chain of production and consumption, and which repair and select what can be sent back up to the surface of progress.
Michel de Certeau