Man does not want to leave his own place. He says that technology is dangerous, that it detracts from our relationship with the world, that true civilizations are those of a stable nature, that the nomad is incapable of acquisition. Who is this man? It is each of us, at times we give in to lethargy. This man suffered a shock the day Gagarin became the first man in space. The event is now almost forgotten; but the experience will be repeated in other forms. In these cases we must pay heed to the man in the street, to the man with no fixed abode. He admired Gagarin, admired him for his courage, for the adventure, and even paid tribute to progress; but one such man gave the right explanation: it is extraordinary, we have left the earth. Herein lies, indeed, the true significance of the experience: man has freed himself from place. He has felt, at least for a moment, the sense of something decisive: far away - in an abstract distance of pure science - removed from the common condition symbolized by the force of gravity, there was a man, no longer in the sky, but in space, in a space which has no being or nature but is the pure and simple reality of a measurable (almost) void. Man, but a man with no horizon. A sacrilegious act. On his return, Gagarin made some jokes in bad taste: he had been to heaven and he had not met God there. The Catholic bodies protested, but wrongly. There is no doubt that it had been a profanity: the old heaven, the heaven of the religions and contemplations, the pure and sublime 'up there', had dissolved in a moment, deprived of the privilege of inaccessibility, to be replaced by a new absolute, by the space of the scientists, which is nothing more than a calculable possibility. Despite all this, more than the Christian, the man who was left defeated by Gagarin was the man inside us, who is eternally seduced by paganism, who desires above all to live upon the earth, to take over the earth, to remain, to found, to put down roots, to belong ontologically to the biological race and his ancestry; the possessive man who wants to have land and who has land, who knows how to take possession and how to cling on; the man, who wherever he is found, is eternally encrusted in his tradition, in his truth, in his history, and who does not want the sacred seats of his beautiful landscape and great past to be attacked; the melancholy man who consoles himself among the trees over the evil of mankind. Gagarin, for a moment, freed us from such a man and lightened for us the load of his millennial baggage (represented so well by Ionesco in Le Locataire). A victory for technology? Certainly. The freedom gained (even though in a still illusory manner) with regard to 'place', this sort of levitation of man as substance, of man as essence obtained by breaking away from 'locality' came to prolong and briefly to conclude the process by which technology upsets sedentary civilizations, destroys human particularisms, makes man leave the utopia of childhood (if it is true that the man-child, in each of us, wishes to return to his place of origin). And how difficult it is to leave these regions and to raise oneself to a formulation of the problems of maturity. We suddenly had occasion to state this, because scarcely had the same Gagarin, escaping ordinary forces and placing himself in a moment of pure dislocation, begun to become a detached man, than Khrushchev hastened to reintegrate him into the species, greeting him in the name of earth, his ‘homeland’: a surprising intimidating expression, a memorable refusal to recognize that it could have been pronounced in the same way by statesmen called Kennedy or de Gaulle, men of the same heritage, ready to exalt the advantages of technology for prestige, but unable to accept it, to realize its consequences, namely the breaking down of all sense of belonging and the questioning of place, in all places.

That is all very well. But should it not also be said that, in a way, Gagarin’s feat - in its political repercussions and in its mythical ones - gave grounds to the Russians to inhabit Russian land even more staunchly? Moreover, can it not appear to have changed the physical relationship with the Outside in a decisive manner? Naturally it is correct to say this, as it is correct to say that the superstition about place cannot be eradicated in us except by a momentary abandonment to some utopia of non-place. The condition of the cosmonaut is, in some respects, pitiful: a man who is the bearer of the very sense of liberty and who has never found himself a greater prisoner of his own position, free of the force of gravity and weighted down more than any other being, on the way to maturity and all bundled up in scientific swaddling clothes, like a new-born child of former times, reduced to nourishing himself with a feeding bottle and to wailing more than talking. Still today I listen to that poor speech, which offers only banality when confronted by the unexpected; a speech devoid, moreover, of any guarantee, and which nothing stops us attributing (as Nixon did) to any mystification one cares to name. And yet, something disturbs us and dismays us in that rambling: it does not stop, it must never stop; the slightest break in the noise would already mean the everlasting void; any gap or interruption introduces something which is much more than death, which is the nothingness outside entered into discourse. It is therefore necessary, up there, for the man from the Outside to speak, and to speak continually, not only to reassure us and to inform us, but because he has no other link with the old place than that unceasing word, which, accompanied by hissing and conflicting with all that harmony of the spheres, says, to whoever is unable to understand it, only some insignificant commonplace, but also says this to him who listens more carefully; that the truth is nomadic.

Editor's note: This text, written in 1961, which was meant to be published in all the different languages of the planned Revue internationale finally only appeared in the Italian literary magazine Gulliver/Il Menabò directed by Elio Vittorini and Italo Calvino in 1964 (trans. Guido Neri). The original manuscript is considered to be lost. Christopher Stevens has retranslated the text from Neri's version for Mike Holland's Blanchot Reader (Blackwell, 1995, pp. 269-271). We are very grateful to Mike Holland and to Blackwell Publisher that this traslation may now be reprinted on ATOPIA along with the other versions of the text.

For more informations, please see the editor's essay "Blanchot the Atopic "