Title

Sharon's Wall and the Dialectics of Inside/Outside

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2006

Abstract

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard ponders modernity's obsession with circumscription and with what he terms, 'geometrism' (Bachelard, 1964: 213). According to Bachelard, we geometrise the world. From real estate to national borders, from nature reserves to nature strips, everything is cut-up, portioned, demarcated. Sharon's Wall in Israel/Palestine is a manifestation of this obsession with geometrism. Bachelard, engaging with phenomenology proposes that being, which is all around us, is not circumscribed - we are not the centre of being, nor is anything else, hence there is in contrast neither 'being-here' nor 'being-there' (1964: 213).

In this essay I present a meditation on the apartheid wall constructed in Israel and Palestine, between 2002 and 2006. I contemplate the meanings of this wall, its lived, material meanings as well as its architectural phenomenology: the spatial and ontological implications for those living either side. I examine the political impact of the binary rhetoric used in media coverage of the wall. I then take an imaginative leap, and using Bachelard's ideas about interior and poetic space, suggest how a different logic, and a more creative conception of space may offer hope to those confined behind the wall.


Comments

Borderlands E - Journal: new spaces in the humanities is an Open Access journal and may be accessed here

Borderlands E - Journal: new spaces in the humanities may be accessed from the National Library of Australia here

Additional Files
University Copyright.pdf (130 kB)
University of Notre Dame Australia Copyright Statement

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS