Space, of course, is where we are. That the image of the point that orients all the relative distances is insufficient has been shown a long time ago: it implies a zone of non-space that has lost all relation to our body. If we are in space, then that is only in as far as we are a space. Kant notes that we can only loosely speak of multiple spaces, because any individuated space is necessarily carved out from a larger one, and thus implies a prior homogeneity in which the individuated region its container are previously unified. There is just the space, one and infinite.
But it is equally unquestionable that within this seemingly infinite container that holds and submerges us, there are privileged zones that are the home of our understanding. There are forbidden spaces, like bank vaults and temples. Spaces to be crossed, like bridges and lanes. Spaces to return to and maintain and orient from, our bodies and homes. Even spaces to be interpreted, as with the reading of the heavens. Despite how just qualitatively homogeneous space appears to our thought, it is addressed to us in another register entirely: as being everywhere and always as qualitatively heterogeneous, overloaded with rich and varied zones that communicate their own logics of proximity, adjacency, and distance.
This latter point, that space addresses itself to us as a qualitative multiplicity, an ever-complicating field of distinctions, is obvious to anyone who shuts their door at night. Even the most simple of geometrical figures testifies to this: “the line divides the plane” as if there would be any plane without lines dividing it. The possibility of getting lost in space bears witness to the fragility of these distinctions, as much as to the power of the openness that, in potentially suspending the cardinal points of orientation, also suspends our capacity of moving through it.
This ambivalence in space provides a tension. If the things within space begin to proliferate their own zones, their own qualitatively distinct enclaves, then how does the mechanism underpinning Kant’s statement of space work? After all, the inside of my house or body is seemingly continuous with its outside, as their eventual decay and destruction will demonstrate. We seemingly go off in vain in search of limits, edges, and borders. Hence the conclusion: space is homogeneous. But, with that conclusion we seemingly miss what makes space what it is: a particular genre of limit, allowing for the proliferation of edges and borders, and homes and temples and signs and pathways too. But, in granting that, we are left with the question of how all these zones are to integrate and communicate. We could return to the beginning, and say the spaces integrate spatially into a space always bigger than them, but this just seems to provide the question again in place of an answer…