ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault’s essay on heterotopia deals with both places, real and imagined sites or types of site, and the idea of emplacement that is relational. The essay, where he tries to define what he means by heterotopia, mingles together, then, a description of particular types of outsider place: cemeteries, museums, brothels, gardens and so on, with an idea of space as relational through the notion of emplacement established through a set of six principles. As Gary Shapiro has pointed out, Foucault’s work can be seen as developing through three distinct periods and objects of enquiry. Foucault speaks of the ship as new form within the imaginary landscape of the Renaissance, a challenging space of contrast in which madness became visible before it was known as madness. The discourse of globalisation has always been shaped by a westerly spatial imaginary as much as by its attempt at fixing and exoticizing the east as Other to itself in a discourse of orientalism.
