Political topographies by Michel Foucault

Abstract

Based on his text “Des espaces autres”, we will analyze how Foucault defines and uses the notion of utopia to understand the spaces and their respective subjectivities produced by the devices of power and knowledge. Also, and mainly, we will show that the French author elucidates the notion of heterotopy as a type of space that exists alongside, across, and within a social environment, and that due to its obliquity and collaterality, it becomes a place of subversion, insubmission, and restlessness. Given this, our work intends to present Foucault’s thinking as a critical-topographical experience, as a question about the present, in the sense of research, questioning, and seeking new possibilities for the present.