Living in the opening of interiorities

Abstract

As an apparently irrevocable trait of our times, not as current anymore, we have been witnessing the intensification, through interdiction, of a selective interiorization of collective life. On the one hand, their majority – and here we might include condominium developments, resorts, museums, malls, and even sophisticated soccer stadiums – are a simulacrum of the public space, translated into immunized islands, with perks and pamperings. On the other hand, we have the so-called Occupations – legal or illegal dwellings – all over the world, stimulating the blossoming of new complex, inside/outside, public/private relations, in the process of interiorizing the common, shared, communal life. Paradoxically, we see the intensification and spread of movements of resistance of vulnerable populations that are legally, economically, and socially at-risk, that takes the form of an action of restitution to the public sphere, what was once “privatized,” as vital territories for survival and existence. Refuge dwellings are disseminated, profaned in their own constitutive logic, counter-communities communities, built and consolidated by the intrusion, by the almost unconditional presence of the other, thus becoming fertile land for a fruitful experience of interiorization of the public, collective, common life. An idea of ​​interiority that arises in a situation formed in most cases through confrontation, intrusion, and reception, establishing and replicating itself, therefore, from logics adverse to the idea of ​​community, a place with no place, in the public-private duality of the urban territory. An interiority that seems to have a more diastolic than systolic pulse, at a rate of something foreign to its own constitutive idea, a place of the non-negative separation, which strengthens relationships. Separation being the precondition for contact with the other, the outsider, a chance of alterity in identity. A current issue in contemporary times, the thematization of alterity, necessarily involves the recognition of the differences, and of what is deemed not proper to the entity. Let us think of a possible method of constructing otherness based on something which, at the limit, could be understood as an oblique path for building urban interiority and interiorized sociability. Oblique because it does not deny its condition, introversion, but denies what is denied in the idea of ​​interiority, its exteriority, the completely other of its ontological dimension. A deviant method, non-conclusive or nor aiming at closure or synthesis, but an open method, of neither-nor, neither this, nor that, but in the in-between, the undecidability [Jacques Derrida’s central concept], between one and the other.