Heterology

From Geography

What would turn out to be the last work of the French scholar Michel de Certeau is called: "Heterologies: Discourse on the other" (Buchanan, 2000). Nowadays most of the time it will be referred to as the book we will never read, because de Certeau passed away before he even finished the book. So some argue we can only assume what he was trying to say, but others like his literary executor Luce Giard argue that all that was left to be filled in is allready present in his existing work.

Definition

What can be said is that the term heterology as used by de Certeau: "Denotes knowledge of the non-representational other repressed and excluded by the hegemony of social scientific writing. For de Certeau, it is the narrative that transcends the gap between representation and reality and constitutes a privileged third position that mediates between theory and practice" (Zhange, 2009). Heterology is the opposite of autology. The term is mostly used in languagephilosophy, to refer to a phenomenon relating to another language than where itself belongs to, like the words Dutch, French and German (Zhange, 2009). They are spelled in English, but they refer to another language than the English.

References

Buchanan, I. (2000) Michel de Certeau: Cultural Theorist. Sage Publications Inc.

Zhange, N. (2009) The Pagan writes back Hetero-religiosity, heterology, and heterogeneous space in four contemporary novels, The University of Chicago

Contributors

--MichaelVoorbraak 13:11, 28 October 2011 (CEST) Enhanced by Marleen Revenberg, 25 October 2012