The badger of Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’ wants to bury himself so he cannot be found. He constructs a vast system of interconnected tunnels in the earth. Can he escape the predator who awaits him outside?
The inner space protects us from what is outside. We are cosy in our dwellings with our televisions and the internet which present us with a simulacrum of what is happening outside. But the outside, here, remains distant. Outside there are the streets where strangers lurk. We instruct our children not to talk to them and drive them to school in 4 X 4s. What matters is safety, and safety is inside.
But what if the interior defines the outside in such a way that it, too, remains parasitical upon the economy of interiority? Even as it is outside, exteriority, according to the conventional understanding of this word, is interiority’s other and can be measured by a common spatial unit.
What would it mean to think an exteriority that is not so interiorised – an exteriority which is never simply outside the interior? No longer is it a question of what can be withheld by a border which maintains the spatial limits of an inner domain. Think instead of the ‘other’ exteriority, one which is no longer organised by a logic of places, by the topology which would keep everything in its place.
Unfold the ‘other’ exteriority of which interiority is only a series of folds and upon which a whole tradition of interiorisation depends upon. What does this mean? The border which would separate the inside from the outside depends upon another border, a limit internal to the articulation of interiority itself. Less clearly defined, hidden in the inner space itself, is a place of struggle against the ‘other’ exteriority upon which it depends.
How should one think this place? Is this akin to the space between tectonic plates from which lava – a figure for the exteriority in question here – would well? This tempts us to think the ‘other’ exteriority spatially, losing precisely what would allow it to remain ‘other’. What, then, if we sought to understand the ‘other’ exterior non-spatially? This would mean we are in the position of Descartes trying to understand how non-extended mind comes into contact with extended body. His solution, which satisfied no one, was to claim the pineal gland permitted a mediation of extended body with non-extended thought.
A third alternative: what if the ‘other’ exteriority were understood to produce interiority? What is the outside if it cannot be so understood – as what, indeed, organises the very economy of spatiality? This drama of interiorisation, its secret struggle, occurs at the heart of interiority. The ‘other’ exterior is not a hidden place but an opening implied in the very interiorisation of the interior. It is ‘there’ as a matter of structure, of constitution. Interiority is inscribed in an exteriority it cannot control. Interiority itself is only a fold of the ‘other’ exteriority.
On this account, the whole complex of tunnels dug by the badger is no more than a series of convoluted pleats. The burrow is only contorsion of the ‘other’ exterior, its invagination. The ‘other’ exterior, then, is ‘within’ what is both inside and outside the burrow. Within both, but also outside both. It is the outside inside. Or rather, it shows there is no interiority which can ever exclude the ‘other’ exteriority. This means the badger is as exposed as he was outside his burrow. Considered in relation to the ‘other’ exteriority, he is on the plain, in the expanse of the desert, with nothing sheltering him from his enemy.
One might go further. Recalling the novel by Philip K. Dick (Eye in the Sky) whose protagonists are turned inside out, is it not that the badger himself is only an invagination of the inside? That at his heart, too, or perhaps in his stomach, there is an ongoing struggle against the outside (the stomach is an excellent example of a kind of internal frontier against exteriority. It cannot digest itself: it remains inside the body, of the body. It digests what is outside the body and allows itself to be incorporated by the body. But what if the stomach itself was only a pleat of the outside?)
Descartes writes of the idea of the infinite which is included within the finite in such a way that it reveals itself to have originated from without. It is the idea of God. Here we have a glimpse of the way in which the outside inhabits the inside. This is not to be conceived on the model of Ridley Scott’s alien, which, after a period of incubation, bursts through the stomach and into the world. It would be the glistening wall of the stomach inside and out as it is only an involution of a single smooth space.
The infinite inside the finite. This is strange to think. But only if the finite and the infinite are thought oppositionally. Perhaps the finite is only a fold of the infinite.
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