In 1966, Foucault delivered two radio broadcasts on “France Culture,” the French public radio station, in a program devoted to the idea of utopia. The first was entitled “Les Hétérotopies,” the second, “Le Corps utopique.” The following year, in a lecture to a group of architects, Foucault elaborated on the notion he named “heterotopia” – literally: different (hetero) space (topia). Nearly twenty years later, this little-known work of Foucault was published as “Des espaces autres.” In subsequent English translations, the lecture has been variously titled “Of Other Spaces” and “Different Spaces.” This short lecture has generated a raft of interpreters and commentators, particularly in the fields of geography and architecture. One person has created an entire website devoted to Heterotopian Studies. If heterotopias are „other spaces,‟ they are nonetheless, and in contrast to utopias, real spaces, or “emplacements,” as Foucault refers to them throughout his lecture. They are most often places that are populated, embodied. Indeed, in his second radio broadcast, “Le corps utopique,” Foucault discusses the body as utopic space, this interest in the body a full decade before we get to the “body of the condemned” in Discipline and Punish or the “bodies and pleasures” of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1.
In this assignment, you will enter, plunge in, cross over, or advance sideways – choose whatever metaphor for movement into the liminal you like – to heterotopia. I can think of a number of different reasons why you should visit heterotopia. First, it is the chance to encounter a perhaps unfamiliar Foucault. While often thought of as the cold chronicler of the carceral, this is Foucault at imaginative full-throttle, at his most lyrical. These are texts to be read aloud; gather your housemates or friends together and deliver a dramatic reading. Second, and again long before Discipline and Punish and the panopticon, Foucault‟s interest in space and architecture is evident here, and thinking about heterotopia will set you up well for our other discussions and work on space, the built environment, and the body.

Begin this assignment by reading “Of Other Spaces” and “Utopian Body.” For the first lecture, one of the English translations can be found online. However, as with reading any of Foucault‟s work in translation, one must be careful. This first translation is not the best. The fourth and most recent translation, complete with helpful annotations, is much better. It can be found in the anthology, Heterotopia and the City (2008), which is on Reserve in the library. The “Utopian Body” has not received as much attention, but it appears in English in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (2006).

After you‟ve digested Foucault‟s lectures, you will write a paper. The paper should do four different things.
1. Choose a heterotopia of your own. Make an argument for it as a heterotopic space by applying Foucault‟s six principles of heterotopia. Be imaginative and, if possible, make it a space we might all be able to visit in some way. It could even be a local space. If there is a visual/graphic component to your heterotopia, include it.
2. Discuss what, in your reading of “Of Other Spaces,” you take the notion of heterotopia to mean. What does Foucault intend the relationship between heterotopic and non-heterotopic space to be, and what are the implications of this for critical thought? Foucault describes heterotopias as “counter-places,” as “other spaces” within dominant space, but are they necessarily counter- hegemonic? Put another way, is there a politics of heterotopia? Is the experience of the body or embodiment key to heterotopia? You can answer these questions in relation to both the lectures and the example of your own heterotopia.
3. Foucault‟s heterotopia is also about space and time, even the space of time, and thus it should be of interest to historians, who, of course, are concerned with the temporal. However, when commentators think through Foucault‟s relationship to history, they seldom use the lectures under consideration here. This may have something to do with the fact that Foucault sets up his thinking about heterotopia and time in contrast to History. What are your own thoughts on the relationship between heterotopia and history? Is it a useful category of historical analysis and, if so, how?
4. The secondary literature on heterotopia is vast. Incorporate in your paper at least two well- chosen works from the secondary literature. Look for work that speaks most directly to your particular heterotopia in order to help illustrate and back up your claims for it.
Format:

· Your paper will be 1700 words in length in a paper set to Times New Roman, 12pt font,
with 1” margins all around, double-spaced. The lead sentence of your critique should
begin on the first line of the first page.
· Include a title page on which you indicate your title, your name, our course number, and
the date.
· Use endnotes (using Arabic numerals), and they should follow the standard format used
in the discipline of history, which is The Chicago Manual of Style.