The 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 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 CerteauWhen he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses [โฆ]. โThe more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories,โ he said.
Michel de CerteauThe trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.
Michel de CerteauEveryday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.
Michel de CerteauFirst, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), than the walked actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements.
Michel de Certeau