In the exhibition Rims and Frontiers, presented in the context of The symptom projects in Amfissa, the frontier is understood as a disputed, constantly shifting and displaceable limit; a circumscription or peripheral zone which defines space through a double process of inclusions and exclusions. A form of generalization, reduction, of stereotypical recognitions and hetero-determinations. The frontier and the borderline condition it reproduces highlight a field in which there are no distinct topographical points. The frontier constitutes a conceivable space whose primary function is to make visible the separation between the known and the unknown, the acceptable and the unacceptable, and therefore the recognizable and the unrecognizable. It solely emphasizes the dimension of distinction and the intersection points inserted in order to make clear the conceivable separations.
In a historical perspective, boundary lines, the so-called frontiers and the colonization of new continents by the West served as a recognition of the civilized world, defining the extent of legitimate humanity. Beyond that point lay the wild world, the Other. In this sense, the frontier, in an ultimate minimization of meaning, indicates the limit of the symbolic and the organizational constitution of the conscious world. Here we distinguish a topological equivalence with the element that Sigmund Freud called the navel (umbilicus) of the dream. In the exhibition Rims and frontiers which is held in Amfissa and Delphi, the navel of the earth, this enigmatic object kept in the Archaeological Museum of Delphi –just as the place itself that serves as a name/transference–, emerge as an iconic signifier, a point of emergence for the pending frontier and the current versions it is taking.
Delphi reflects a heterotopia. The navel of the earth which appears as a residue, as inoperative symbolism, acts as a privileged emergency point for characteristics of limit topology. At once ec-centric and substantialised, the area illuminates the operation and the political importance of spatial and discoursive substantialisations, of their variable boundary circumscriptions, and of reductive reflections that result in a form of contradiction and exclusion of the Other. As a process, the frontier metaphorically tends towards the method of reductio ad absurdum of the Euclidean and Aristotelian logic, according to which we can see the borderline fields in a new perspective. The reductio ad absurdum commences from the place of the Other, from an unknown area which we initially accept as true, so as to subsequently prove that it is an excluded set. The place of the Other is the material which is negated as foreign; a diversion of the inner confrontational element of Sameself, a version of repulsion and ambivalence. The principle of the excluded middle forms the core of the frontier. The other is false from the outset, but we conventionally affirm to it in order finally to prove that it remains unattainable. He himself is unattainable, and his place is empty, a spot. His place is outlined in the form of an uninterpretable, crossed-out letter that allows a return to one’s own origin, concluding that the other is wrong.
The frontier is a condition which escapes from discourse. It is neither defined by language nor organized by the symbolic, by the Law. Inside its own area only the present lawlessness of sovereignty applies and the utterly unaccountable domination. Furthermore, a typical frontier in the long temporality of colonization was always an indistinct geographical marker, a place defined only through the faint horizon that summarized the disorderly exit of the world. Its virtual space constitutes a mechanics which indicates the limit of our thinking and practice, an uninterpretable and uneven border. The archaeological site of Delphi constitutes such a limit today and acts as an exemplary physical version of heterotopia. According to the principles listed by Michel Foucault in his text Of other spaces: Utopias and heterotopias (1984), the heterotopia is fulfilled, among other factors, by the coexistence within the limits of a certain area of multiple spaces which are incompatible. Delphi, besides the enigmatic landmark that identifies the location as the centre of the world, bears this manifold topology of coexistence. The ancient religious space constitutes a polyphonic region for dedications, layered with the logic of heterotopic condensation and representation. Hence each distinct power, each administrative entity, maintains its own sanctuary, its own ritual space connected to the metaphysical referential to which their pleas are addressed. This complex formation is a typical Foucauldian heterotopia, distinguished by the particular spatiality of the theatrical scene. The layout of the site of Delphi retains the exact function of the expanded scene where heterogeneous entities are condensed and where complex spatiotemporal insertions perform.
It is a space-time clause that attempts to set conditions in a split heterochronic field, i.e. a system that colonizes past and present time, founding a protocol of spatiotemporal sovereignty according to which the past is legitimized by the distinct power of the subject of archaeology and powered by the national imaginary and the Western model of hegemony. Delphi and the centre of the world animate an enigmatic object which absorbs rather than emits meaning; a symbolically charged geographical marking that conceptually colonises the present acting through the seduction of distant space-time constitution, through the veil of archaeological knowledge and the occult character of mythology. Just as the navel of the dream, the Delphic navel is an uninterpretable area whose real core is absent from the symbolic program as we know it today. Transcribing Slavoj Zizek, we would say that the phallic shape of the navel of the earth operates as the absolute holder of the position of the gap, a supreme attempt to fill in the gap of meaning as well as transcendental guarantor of the suture of the world. Delphi radically reveals the very emptiness of the constitution of the centre and its uninterrupted task of producing differential subjects (both central/major and peripheral/minor). In this sense we would say, connecting Zizek’s reasoning to that of Foucault, that the Delphic heterotopia is precisely this kind of symbolic differential mechanism.
In the exemplary topological markings —which are formed in ideological terms and then configure reductive differential identifications and spatiotemporal aberrations which contribute to the establishment of a sovereign system of discrimination and stratification— we recognize an equivalence of form to what Foucault calls heterotopia of deviation, which fragments and legitimates a model of multi-fragmented coexistence. Heterotopia, defined as an opening and closing system that imposes exclusion while allowing clandestine crossings and movements, can be seen here as an empty master signifier. Such is undoubtedly the case of Delphi. The region’s name alone signifies the concept of centrality and installs the idea of a hypothetical reference point that quilts the meaning. The navel of the earth (the object-symbol) and the name Delphi (the area-symbol) are the metonymic physical version of a spatiotemporal ideology that announces the variously hierarchical —in terms of history, geography, etc.— asymmetrical division of the world and incessantly invents ways of legitimising that division. Of course, in this sense, the navel of the earth attempts a precarious balance: on the one it represents the absolute Western cultural invention of the centre (and the concept of centrality in general), and on the other it promotes a romantic contemplation of the modern subject, highlighting the chaotic distance that divides the present from the ancient world and emphasizing the magnitude of this construction. Therefore, the Delphic signifier is an ambivalent field, both local and universal, timely and outdated, influential and inert; a sovereign empty signifier which performs in different contexts, legitimizing diverse meanings. Here, the provincial archaeological find of a former religious (and political) epicentre corroborates a mythologically articulated world which, although definitively obsolete, still remains topical in terms of how it constructed dominant meanings.
Returning to the concept of the border, we must note that in this limit topology essentially highlights the dimension of indiscriminate classification in the general category of non-recognition. Everything that falls within the border condition sheds its specificity and goes into an amorphous continuum of suspicion and hostility: a continuum obscured under the veil that erases all qualities and arbitrarily classifies everything under the all-levelling category of ‘sinister’. The frontier is not a point in place or a geographical marker; instead, it is constituted as a topological signifier in a schematic structure that underscores the limits of relevance and separation. The frontier denotes a space that emerges as a concept rather than a physical reality: it is perceived intellectually—it does not exist as a physical entity. Even as such, it still remains latent and emerges only at the time of its abolition: when a process of conflicts, social unrest and political change generates conceptual shifts that require and produce border conditions of existence. It is in this way that the border condition leaves a visible trace and thus becomes comprehensible. This statutory condition, namely the emergence and recognition of excluded subjects (which are divided by the body itself), marks the boundary area. These subjects do not go through a Foucauldian heterotopia of crisis where a stratified rite of passage is performed; what is implied here is a breaking point which stands as an obstacle and performs a continuous process of breakdown and separation. The psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati notes in his text Lo stile politico della paranoia : “[…] paranoid hatred is a political response to ambivalence, which seeks to eliminate it by surgery. For this reason, the enemy must take on the characteristics of something completely different, alien, foreign. […] What the political tone of paranoia tends to do is to fundamentally distinguish the Same by the Other, turning the Other into a sinister pleasure against which the Self is called upon to seek protection. Thus the Self makes its boundary impenetrable, whereas ambivalence, on the contrary, shows that the borders (between friend and enemy) are necessarily interrelated.” Gavrielides, the Greek translator of Recalcati’s text, referring to the work of Carl Schmitt adds an explanatory note: ‘The frontier is in itself a strict definition that allows one to identify the enemy as a foreigner. What is lost here is the issue raised by Fornari on the paranoid mode of hostility as a deficient work of mourning. In the light of psychoanalysis, the enemy is above all a name of the subject, and thus a stranger totally internal to the subject. No wonder the state within a state or the inner foreign territory are two of the most inspired Freudian definitions of the unconscious. In this perspective, the ethics of psychoanalysis demands that we see the enemy not so much as a question of external determination, and hence of limits, but as a question of ambivalence.”
Therefore, the frontier is constructed similarly to the other scene (Der andere Schauplatz) of Freud’s early psychoanalytical topology, as a theatrical heterotopia, as a displacement which serves the acting out of the core that constitutes contemporary identities; a territory where the ambivalence of modern cultural meaning and its roots emerges in its most exemplary form, and the concern over filling the gap emerges through the ruptures of the dominant narrative.