Theory & Event

“The city is not primarily ‘community,’ any more than it is primarily ‘public space.’ The city is at least as much the bringing to light of a being-in-common as the dis-position (dispersal and disparity) of the community represented as founded in interiority or transcendence. It is ‘community’ without common origin. That being the case, and as long as philosophy is an appeal to origin, the city, far from being philosophy’s subject or space, is its problem”

—Jean Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 23

Whereas for Jean Luc Nancy the problem upon which political philosophy organizes its thought is the city of ancient Greece, the problem in Matthew Sparke’s In the Space of Theory is one of the nation-state. In the Space of Theory is not simply one in a long line of commentaries on the nation-state. Instead, just as Nancy is interested in the relationship between political philosophy and its problem, the city, Sparke seeks to recognize the “dis-positions” covered over in postfoundational critiques of the nation-state structured by less than critical spatial abstractions. These “anemic geographies” are identified by Sparke in works by some of today’s most important postfoundational theorists: Homi Bhabha, Arjun Appadurai, Timothy Mitchell, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In the Space of Theory is an elaborate, dense and rewarding treatment of the “problem” of spatial abstraction at the core of contemporary political philosophy.

Jacques Derrida’s practice of deconstruction and Gayatri Spivak’s understandings of context and deconstructive responsibility provide the theoretical motivation of In the Space of Theory. Sparke’s introduction offers an outline of the geographic “arguments” in both Derrida and Spivak’s thought, although the theme of the geographic is never explicitly elaborated in their writings. The basis for Sparke’s deconstructive readings lies in the mark of the hyphen and the neologism: hyphen-nation-states. The hyphen is the trace of the abstraction of space, without which the co-figuration of the nation and the state would not be possible; it is “the unthought-of-nation-state territoriality” (177). In the Space of Theory is, in fact, an exploration of two hyphens. The first hyphen inscribes the much discussed proximity of nation and state (nation-state), while the second hyphen marks the “latent,” absent presence of the hyphen within the term geo(-)graphy, insofar as the “the geo is constantly being graphed” (xiv). It is within the function of this second hyphen that Sparke develops his deconstruction of spatial abstractions.

Geographic practice, for Sparke, is necessarily linked to writing. The term “geography,” the “writing of the geo,” discloses a graphematic structure that Sparke situates in the language of Derrida’s early critiques of speech and the metaphysics of presence:

when geographers and whomever else set out to describe a particular geography... there is a similar metaphysics of presence at work — what might be called a metaphysics of geopresence — that fixates on the “geo” of a particular spatial pattern or a particular poetics of location while simultaneously downplaying the geographic diversity of the constitutive processes that produced it

(xxix).

This deconstructive mode is pursued throughout In the Space of Theory. Geography is premised upon a spacing, the latent hyphen itself, that indicates difference from itself (as “diversity” or perhaps Nancy’s “dis-position” is helpful here) in its identity as geographical coherence. This form of geo-graphematic critique, however, is not posited as a method proper. Instead, it is a “responsibility” that follows Spivak’s response to Derrida’s invocation of responsibility (a responsibility of the “where?”) in Specters of Marx. Sparke terms this responsibility a “deconstructive geographic responsibility” in which “critics have a responsibility persistently to ask about how heterogeneous graphings of the geo are dissembled in any particular geography” (xxix).

In the Space of Theory aims to de-naturalize the theories and rhetorics of deterritorialization emergent in the 1990s, ones still powerful in...