Cartes Incertaines: Regard Critique Sur L'Espace

Often considered as an orientation and navigation tool, maps are intended to reassure us as we navigate on the earth. But what would happen if we were travelling with maps which disorient us?There certainly is no shortage of maps, but they are not all equally reliable! Some merely reproduce reality, while others, to the contrary, invent it. In addition to external maps used by geographers-geodesists-land surveyors, there are internal maps used by cosmographers-painters-writers and, indeed, all those whose lines fire the imagination, as did Michaux, who said, “I want my lines to be the very phrasing of life.”The maps which will concern us here are precisely those which resist the tyranny of analogy to plunge us into the mad depths of these uncertain outlines. Such memory-bereft maps leave tracks and yet refuse to follow any sort of path. In doing so, they drag us off into improbable and unknown geographies.This journey is taken by means of a dialogue woven between Michaux’s poetic works and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical writings. It also provides an opportunity to clarify Maurice Blanchot’s theory expressing the main theme of the following words: “Thus were they walking, immobile within the movement.” These unfamiliar maps afford us an occasion to advance immobile within the movement, as if to tell us that the fixation points drawn by spatial geometry consist first and foremost of the fictional points invented by geometry.