Place/s of Thinking: On the Claims of Inter “Cultural” Philosophy
26-28 September 2013, University of Vienna
Thinking happens at/in a place. Obviously, there always needs to be a site or a point of view where thinking occurs—a place at which a thought manifests, arrives, changes itself and proceeds along in new ways. At first, this statement sounds trivial and obvious. Of course, thinking in any manner presumes a place, just as every statement, every action, every sensation, and so forth does. It appears then that it would be nearly impossible for thinking to take place without actually taking place; thinking would simply have no impression or expression. Certainly, “place” can refer to a manifold of things—the body (lived and physical), political class, social status, (socialized) gender, language, cultural networks, lifeworlds, and last but not least (geographical) landscapes as well as (historical) time periods. All of these are, within each constellation, not only the places that condition thought, rather each appears to allow only a determined, bordered, and restricted type of thinking according to each sense of place. And yet, deeply penetrating experiences of thinking in both the past and present always again raise the claim of being universal and in this sense of being inter- and/or trans-cultural, which always means between bodies and beyond the body, between and beyond the strata and settings of geography, time, language, gender, skin color, and so on.
The breadth of this problem prompts a question, namely, what are the theoretical approaches that can help us explore and understand the complexities of where thinking takes place? How can we comprehend this unfathomable concept of “a place”, and why does it seem that thinking presupposes it—or rather, if anything, does place shape thinking? Can one speak at all of a “pure” place, unaffected by thinking, without running into problems? Or, on the contrary, does thinking have to be bound to a certain place? Might “universal” thinking be possible, in a way that thinks between and beyond places and that occurs always from elsewhere? Does a plurality of places change or resituate the apparent tension between thinking and place?
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