Heterotopias: Spaces for the Practice of Freedom. Investigations into a Spatial Category in the Philosophy of Michel Foucault and Late Work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This doctoral dissertation examines Michel Foucault\u27s concept of heterotopia, which it locates within the domain of his analysis of political rationality. Heterotopia is the name for a place defined within borders and circumscribed by a space under certain rules, norms and power-relations. The place is finite and the experience of human bodies in it has a finite duration. Heterotopia is not an irrational intervention within the hegemonic political rationality; human subjects create through their interaction with this space other rules, norms and political rationalities. Hetero-topos, a compound word meaning other place, enables human agency, because it allows the freedom to create other rationalities and to follow them. My investigation is devoted to the question of how to conceptualize or to logically determine the suspension of—or the intervention into—the hegemonic political rationality and its power technology. Furthermore, I investigate the representation of such spaces in the late work of Goethe. He reflects in these works the sensitivities of the early 19th century, the transitional age from the classical to the modern. I explore the possibility of reading the representations of paradise in the West-Eastern Divan and The Elective Affinities as heterotopias.