ABSTRACT
I should like to begin with a simple experiment. Take a pen and a sheet of plain paper (or a piece of chalk and a blackboard) and draw a rough circle. How should we interpret this line? Strictly speaking, it is the trace left by the gesture of your hand as, holding the pen (or chalk), it alighted on the surface and took a turn around before continuing on its way to wherever it would go and whatever it would do next. However, viewing the line as a totality, ready-drawn on the surface, we might be inclined to reinterpret it quite differently – not as a trajectory of movement but as a static perimeter, delineating the figure of the circle against the ground of an otherwise empty plane. With this figure we seem to have set up a division between what is on the ‘inside’ and what is on the ‘outside’. Now this interpretation, I contend, results from the operation of a particular logic, which has a central place in the structure of modern thought. I call it the logic of inversion.1 In a nutshell, what it does is to turn the pathways along which life is lived into boundaries within which it is contained. Life, according to this logic, is reduced to an internal property of things which occupy the world but do not properly inhabit it. A world which is occupied, I argue, is furnished with already existing things. But one which is inhabited is woven from the strands of their continual cominginto-being.
