Notes on Micheal de Certeau's "Walking in the City"

Michel de Certeau. “Walking in the City” in The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

coincidentia oppositorum is a Latin phrase meaning coincidence of opposites. It is a neoplatonic term attributed to 15th century German polymath Nicholas of Cusa in his essay, De Docta Ignorantia (1440). Mircea Eliade, a 20th century historian of religion, used the term extensively in his essays about myth and ritual, describing the coincidentia oppositorum as "the mythical pattern". Psychiatrist Carl Jung, philosopher and Islamic Studies professor Henry Corbin as well as Jewish philosophers Gershom Scholem and Abraham Joshua Heschel also used the term. In alchemy, coincidentia oppositorum is a synonym for conjunction, the fifth process.

The term is also used in describing a revelation of the oneness of things previously believed to be different. Such insight into the unity of things is a kind of transcendence, and is found in various mystical traditions. The idea occurs in the traditions of Tantric Hinduism and Buddhism, in German mysticism, Taoism, Zen and Sufism, among others.

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Icarus/Daedalus

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Texturology (texture, Latin: features of a structure of something considered as a whole, caused by an arrangement of its components; and logos, Greek: knowledge, doctrine)

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"They walk-an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmiinner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban "text" they write without being able to read it." {like the character in Auster's "City of Glass" New York Trilogy}

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"Within this ensemble, I shall try to locate the practices that are foreign to the "geometrical" or "geographical" space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions."

"These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations ("ways of operating"), to "another spatiality" (an "anthropological," poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical, city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city."

"Linking the city to the concept never makes them identical, but it plays on their progressive symbiosis: to plan a city is both to think the very plurality of the real and to make that way of thinking the plural effective; it is to know how to articulate it and be able to do it."

Rhetoric of Walking as "figures of speech"

"Synecdoche makes more dense: it amplifies the detail and miniaturizes the whole. Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility."