Dillan Marsh
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The Mirror 2015-04-14
Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias
The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror,
I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind
the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my
own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent:
such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror
does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I
occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place
where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it
were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the
other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my
eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror
functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the
moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected
with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be
perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.
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