“Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language…they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’. This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fibula; heterotopias…desiccate speech, stop words in the tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences” (Preface xviii)
I find this quote interesting.
I don’t understand it. But I did find an intriguing essay online that defines heterotopia as the space outside of the society that produced it that carries a relation to all other remaining “external” spaces. The difference between a utopia and a heterotopia is that the latter possess corporeal reality, material reality. If the reflection in the mirror is a utopia, then the mirror as a medium object is a heterotopia.
If you would like to read the rest of the essay: http://www.knutasdam.net/Texts/HeterotopiaKAsdam.pdf
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