Speculation, Geography & Co.

Speculative Geography. A chance to profit at last. In theory at least. Ruin more likely than not. We wager that Geography has never been anything other than speculative, profiteering in theory and practice. Risky business, every speculative adventure—especially for the world as its oyster. Obviously, the blood-soaked history and philosophy of Geography should be X-rated (Livingstone, 1992). Later, when we advance seemingly bloodless speculations about the impossibility and unreality of this, that, and the other, and hedge our position by way of Borges and British idealism, bear the political economy and libidinal economy of geographical speculation in mind. The speculators advance their wagers, banking on a return, while the regulators and thought police rig the game to mitigate against absolute loss and systemic collapse, as the House of Reason “works the ‘putting at stake’ into an investment, as it amortizes absolute expenditure” (Derrida, 1978: 324). Theses, hypotheses, postulates, conjectures, and suchlike are put into play, perhaps even tested to destruction (Ronnell, 2005), but the result, even when falsified and nullified, is destined to return to the profit of reason. The House always wins. This is both tragic and comic. “What is laughable is the submission to the self-evidence of meaning, to the force of this imperative: that there must be meaning, that nothing must be definitely lost” (Derrida, 1978: 325).

Speculative Geography banks on interest, both in senses relating to a right to participate or share (a concern, a claim, a stake, an entitlement, a responsibility, an accountability) and in senses relating to compensation for injury, detriment or damages, especially with respect to loans, debts, and other losses. There is no such thing as ‘idle’ or ‘wild’ speculation because speculation always plays itself out to the advantage of reason. The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy succinctly sets out the House rules: “speculative adj. 1 theoretical (in contrast to practical). 2 non-empirical (in contrast to empirical). 3 conjectural, uncertain” (Mautner, 2005: 584). Hereinafter, one must speculate within reason, since reason is what extends speculation its line of credit and judges its worth. Speculation must return to reason, to which it remains permanently indebted. In short: reason dictates—that speculation is not without reason. And logic dictates—how speculation ought to reason. “Logic lays down norms—standards of correctness—for right reasoning” (Goldstein et al., 2005: 12). Consequently, speculation makes a faux pas (false step) when it tries to step (not) beyond (pas au-delà) or outpace what reason and logic mandate (Blanchot, 1992; Derrida, 2011), perhaps in pursuit of a real that stands (up) to reason, as if one could step over one’s own feet or reach a real that “carries its place stuck to the sole of its shoe” (Lacan, 2006: 17).

In his deconstruction of the theory/practice dualism, Derrida (2019) notes how Aristotle not only confined speculation within reason, but also restricted its purview to contingency.

He … distinguished two parts of the soul, logon echon (which has reason) and alogon (irrational). Pursuing that division, he distinguishes, within logon echon, two parts: that is where the theoretical and practical appear (inside the logos, then). One of the rational parts of the soul allows us to look at [theoroumen: the translation says ‘contemplate’ …] ‘the kind of things whose principles [archai] cannot be other than they are’ [very important for how the theoretical is constantly defined: can’t intervene in or change what it looks at for it is dealing with what cannot be otherwise …]. The other part of the soul as logon echon is the part that knows contingent things. … Aristotle calls that part logistikon (logistical, calculating, deliberative), for one can calculate and deliberate on only contingent things, … and he calls epistemic, scientific, epistemonikon, the theoretical part dealing with the necessary and immutable. (Derrida, 2019: 81)

Hereinafter, speculation is free to roam within the confines of the Prison House of Reason, limited only by the double bind that keeps it firmly in its padded cell and the inescapable obligation to submit to logic and reason. Roam where? Amongst the antinomies. With Kant, it is the ‘interest of reason’ that arrests the vacillation of pure speculative reason through an appeal to practical reason.

Kant asks: what would a man do if he could emancipate himself from every interest and remain indifferent to all the consequences of theses and antitheses. … Such a man would follow only the principles of reason wherever they led him, taking into account their intrinsic value alone, their value as rational principle. … He would be, Kant says, in a state of ceaseless vacillation. … The double bind, which is the … double obligation to follow contradictory rational principles, … would here be rational and based on principle. … How to escape from this theoretico-speculative double bind? Well, replies Kant, … Practice is the rational solution to the visionary effects of theoretical speculation, of pure speculative reason. (Derrida, 2019: 33–34)

On Derrida’s reading of the theory/practice dualism after Kant, via Marx’s (1946 [1845]) Theses on Feuerbach (“All mysteries which lead (veranlassen) [or rather ‘mislead’ (verleiten), if you prefer Engels’ posthumous correction of Marx’s notes: entice, seduce, lead away from the correct path, lead astray] theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice”) and Althusser’s (1979) Theory of theoretical practices (a guard-rail ensuring theory and practice follow the correct path without deviation or depravation), the comeuppance is that while “it is good to develop theses and antitheses freely, free from threat” (Derrida, 2019: 34), this liberty must be kept in check—disciplined, says Whitehead (1929)—by the interest of reason, by practical reason, to avoid falling prey to vacillation and hallucination. Speculation owes it to reason to practise self-restraint; to resist the temptation of Theoretical deviation (error and errancy) and ‘pure’ speculation; and to submit itself to all of the correctional facilities that reason has at its disposal for dealing with errant, deviant, and vagrant thoughts. This submission is well illustrated by Freud.

In ‘Speculations—On “Freud”’ Derrida discusses Freud’s investment in a series of ‘speculative’ works, especially Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1955), which “promise[d], on the threshold of the ‘loosest hypothesis,’ an inexhaustible reserve for speculation” (Derrida, 1987: 280). One can understand the lure of such untapped wealth, but also the risk of mania and the fear of returning with fool’s gold. Freud vacillates. On the one hand, he says that he has “given free rein to the inclination, which I kept down for so long, to speculation” (Freud, quoted in Derrida, 1987: 272). On the other hand, Freud says: “I should not like to create an impression that during this last period of my work I have turned my back upon patient observation and have abandoned myself entirely to speculation” (Freud, quoted in Derrida, 1987: 265). This peculiar libidinal economy brings into play that other House of Reason, which Derrida (1987: 281) wryly likens to “a free zone, a place of free exchange for the comings and goings of speculation,” a brothel-house for “duty-free” speculation that would owe nothing to the pimps of reason.

Much could be said about the House of Reason as a brothel-house (Deleuze, 1989; Derrida, 1986; Lacan, 2006 [Kant with Sade]), but we will limit ourselves to Lyotard’s account of Theory’s “compulsion to stop” (Lyotard, 1993: 250). “What does the theoretical text offer its fascinated client? An impregnable body” (Lyotard, 1993: 246). Goldstein et al. (2005: 14) express it thus: “The logician’s Holy Grail is a notation for formulating thoughts clearly and unambiguously, and an inference machine that is guaranteed to reason unerringly. This was Leibniz’ vision: a characteristica universalis and a calculus ratiocinator.” Such is the desire of the theoretical: a closed system in perpetual motion. “It is not what is spoken of that becomes immobilized by discourse,” adds Lyotard; “it is discourse itself, a system of acceptable statements within the ‘chosen’ set of axioms, which strives to come to rest” (Lyotard, 1993: 247–248).

Now, there are few more arresting theoretical bodies than the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea (fifth century bce), which have kept philosophers and mathematicians puzzling for over two-and-a-half millennia—not only in seeking to refute or evade them (usually in vain), but also in seeking to reconstruct them from the fragments relayed by Aristotle, Plato, and Simplicius. This all stems from Zeno’s attempt “to justify the contention of his master Parmenides, that Being is one and unchanging, by showing that multiplicity and motion led to contradiction, and were therefore mere appearance” (Smith, 1983: 257–258). While this may sound obscure, the consequences have proven devastating for Western thought. It is towards these paradoxes, which seem to outstep, outpace, and outsmart both reason and logic, that we now stride.

Stirring Still

The paradox of Zeno … is an attempt upon not only the reality of space but the more invulnerable and sheer reality of time. … Such a deconstruction, by means of only one word, infinite, … once it besets our thinking, explodes and annihilates it. (Borges, 1999: 47)

A strong family resemblance marks all four of Zeno’s paradoxes—‘The Dichotomy,’ ‘Achilles and the Tortoise,’ ‘The Arrow,’ and ‘The Stadium’—which “turn on the problems of the infinitely small magnitude and the infinitely large number. They demonstrate that movement is a contradiction, as is the indefinite divisibility of space and time” (Smith, 1983: 258). Aristotle—perhaps wilfully misrepresenting Zeno’s intent—cast them as examples of fallacious reasoning.

First is the argument that says that there is no motion because that which is moving must reach the midpoint before the end. … It is always necessary to traverse half the distance, but these are infinite, and it is impossible to get through things that are infinite. (Aristotle, Physics; cited in Curd, 2011: 68)

This, ‘The Dichotomy,’ whose endless divisibility of space opens up an infinite abyss that is uncrossable, covers similar ground to ‘Achilles and the Tortoise,’ which pits two infinite series against one another: “the slowest as it runs will never be caught by the quickest. For the pursuer must first reach the point from which the pursued departed, so that the slower must always be some distance in front” (Aristotle, Physics; cited in Curd, 2011: 68–69). Each time fleet-footed Achilles reaches the spot where the plodding tortoise once was, the tortoise will have advanced a little further, and so on ad infinitum, in an ever-decreasing two-step that will approach but never reach its limit. With ‘The Arrow,’ Aristotle (Physics; cited in Curd, 2011: 69) candidly complains that:

Zeno makes a mistake in reasoning. For if, he says, everything is always at rest when it occupies a space equal to itself, and what is moving is always ‘at a now,’ the moving arrow is motionless. … This follows from assuming that time is composed of ‘nows.’ If this is not conceded, the deduction will not go through. (Aristotle, Physics; cited in Curd, 2011: 69)

Zeno argues that at every instant the arrow is motionless since it occupies a space precisely equal to itself; it cannot move in (or at) an instant. And since the whole flight is composed of nothing but instants, the arrow must remain motionless; it cannot move between instants. Finally, ‘The Stadium’ concerns the relative motion of moving and stationary bodies, demonstrating “that half the time is equal to the double” (Aristotle, Physics; cited in Curd, 2011: 69–70). Suffice to say that Zeno’s paradoxes are remarkable for their resistance to countless supposedly ‘definitive’ refutations that keep on coming, in part because their purpose has been variously interpreted as demonstrating a fault or faults in reasoning, in reality, or in both (whether relatively, as a mismatch, or absolutely). Borges (1999: 43) declared ‘The Achilles’ “immortal.”

To cut to the chase, consider the contention that Zeno’s paradoxes were finally solved by nineteenth-century mathematics, specifically “when Cauchy clarified such fundamental concepts as functions, limits, convergence of sequences and series, the derivative, and the integral; and when his successors Dedekind, Weierstrass, et al., provided a satisfactory analysis of the real number system and its connections with the calculus” (Salmon, 1980: 35). To gain a sense of what this purportedly achieved, consider ‘The Dichotomy,’ in which the space to be traversed is repeatedly halved in a geometric progression that appears endless. Any finite distance can be infinitely divided. To move any distance whatsoever therefore requires an infinite number of steps: an impossible feat. Such is the paradox of the ad infinitum, the logic of which applies equally to time as to space. Motion in time and space is impossible. Almost everyone down the ages has agreed that these conclusions are absurd. “The Cynic Diogenes of Sinope is alleged to have refuted them by taking a stroll” (Kołakowski, 2007: 15). Some have argued that an indivisible element would put a stop to division (atomism); others refused to believe that the abstract notion of infinity could actually exist. While a single step could be infinitely divided in theory, it could not in practice.

Nineteenth-century mathematics reputedly resolved the ‘Dichotomy’ and ‘Achilles’ paradoxes by recasting the ad infinitum as ‘at the limit’ rather than ‘without limit.’ Mathematics did not so much refute Zeno’s paradoxes as try to evade them. For while it is true that one cannot complete an infinite series of steps—a so-called ‘super-task’—such as counting an infinite series of numbers or passing through an infinite series of points, the infinitely many terms of a convergent series have a finite sum. Whilst it is impossible to count an infinite series of zeros one by one, it certainly amounts to zero. Likewise, one cannot find a finite solution to summing an infinite series of ones (1 + 1 + 1 + …) but the sum of the dichotomizing progression, ½ + ¼ + 1/8 + 1/16 …, converges on 1. For Borges (1999: 44), “[t]hat methodical dissolution, that boundless descent into more and more minute precipices, is not really hostile to the problem; imagining it is the problem.” The need for Achilles to cover an infinite number of distances does not require him to cover an infinite distance. Nevertheless, “passing from the series to its limit … is precisely … where the difficulty lies” (Cajori, 1915: 256); “the chasm … had in some mysterious way to be leapt over” (Ernest Hobson, 1902, quoted in Cajori, 1915: 216). For Bertrand Russell, this leap amounts to the completion of a super-task—a leap of faith that has sparked interminable debate (Grünbaum, 1969) and huge speculative interest in so-called infinity machines (Black, 1951).

Russell applauded the nineteenth-century arithmetization of the calculus, which had previously rested on the vaguest of spatio-temporal intuitions: the ‘infinitesimals’ and ‘differentials’ that Newton and Leibniz defined as infinitely small numbers (approximating zero without being zero), parodied by Berkeley as spectral apparitions—the ‘ghosts of departed quantities.’

Weierstrass, by strictly banishing from mathematics the use of infinitesimals, has at last shown that we live in an unchanging world, and that the arrow in its flight is truly at rest. Zeno’s only error lay in inferring (if he did infer) that, because there is no change, therefore the world is in the same state at any one time as at another. (Russell, 1943: 347)

Russell’s interpretation—which casts motion-in-an-instant as a contradiction in terms, and regards ‘instantaneous velocity’ as necessarily relational, derived in relation to neighbouring points in time—does not actually amount to a declaration of an ‘unchanging world.’ It amounts to a denial that things change by changing or being-in-flux (possessing an intrinsic state of becoming), thus viewing change as merely a matter of comparative states of being at different instants. The so-called ‘at–at’ theory of motion exemplifies this conception: matching positions in space with points in time is all that ‘motion’ entails (Salmon, 2001). Henri Bergson (1910: 115), most famously, objects “that we cannot make movement out of immobilities, nor time out of space.” Hence his denunciation of the ‘cinematographic illusion,’ which tries in vain to reconstitute real movement and concrete duration from a succession of snapshots or immobile instants (Bergson, 1911; Deleuze, 1991). One cannot simply rewind and replay time in the manner that Russell’s account assumes. Likewise with Zeno’s conflation of an indivisible action (movement) with the infinitely divisible line that movement traces over space. “The mistake of the Eleatics arises from their identification of this series of acts, each of which is of a definite kind and indivisible, with the homogeneous space which underlies them” (Bergson, 1910: 113). Despite all the fancy footwork, the ground of Zeno’s paradoxes remains undisturbed.

After an exhaustive survey of countless mathematical and philosophical attempts to solve Zeno’s paradox of Dichotomy, all of which came to naught, Cajori (1915: 215) argued that a final solution required two ideas and a diagonal argument that only emerged in the 1880s–1890s after Georg Cantor: the existence of actual infinite aggregates and a connected and perfect continuum. And yet, the posing and deposing of new diagonal solutions have continued unabated, such as conceiving of instants not as points but as neighbourhoods of infinity (Reeder, 2015). “The proposed solutions to the logical paradoxes haven’t removed the contradiction[s], they have just moved them,” says Vandycke (2007: 321), risking a contradictio in adjecto. This is, perhaps, apt given Hegel’s insistence on movement as the realization of contradictions. In some respects, Bergson echoes Hegel’s objection that “[m]athematical cognition … as an external activity, reduces what is self-moving to mere material, so as to possess in it an indifferent, external, lifeless content” (cited in Smith, 1983: 264). Russell (1908: 242) is disingenuous in claiming that: “In Hegel’s day, the procedure of mathematicians was full of errors, which Hegel did not condemn as errors, but welcomed as antinomies.” For Hegel criticized the notion of infinitesimals as an impossible “intermediate state … between being and nothing”: “the unity of being and nothing … is not a state. …[O]n the contrary, this mean and unity, the vanishing or equally the becoming is alone their truth” (Hegel, cited in Smith, 1983: 262). “It is … because infinity is a contradiction that it is an infinite process, unrolling endlessly in time and in space,” says Engels (1939: 62): “The removal of this contradiction would be the end of infinity. Hegel saw this quite correctly.” In short, a real contradiction differs from a logical impasse. This is the basis of Priest’s (2006: 131) dialetheism, which “allows time to be both inconsistent and real.” On this conception, a body in motion “does indeed occupy the spot s, but, equally, since it is in motion, it has already started to leave that spot; hence [it] is not still there” (Priest, 1989: 396–397). The arrow is truly both there and not there, in a state of real contradiction and intrinsic flux, just as time itself embodies this inconsistent state, its contradictory status betokening a state of becoming.

The Unreality of Unreality

If the stone-in-motion is not in some way different from the stone at rest, it is never in motion (nor for that matter at rest). (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 268)

In the manner of a film montage featuring a map, a biplane, and changeable atmospheric conditions to signify a truly astonishing passage of time and traversal of space, let us begin by splicing together some quotations to signal a shift of position. “[B]efore the last quarter of the nineteenth century it was the prevailing view that Zeno’s arguments were merely interesting fallacies” (Cajori, 1920: 12). “Aristotle and subsequent Greek writers … expended their mental acumen in attempts to point out the real nature of the fallacies” (Cajori, 1915: 39). Whatever the practical efficacy of Diogenes’s famed refutatio ambulando, many modern thinkers have wrestled with the fact that the paradoxes appear to be “flawless in logical rigor” (Cajori, 1915: 39). It has therefore been a Herculean effort to force Zeno’s fallacies “to surrender their secrets” and “enter the group of ‘problems of the past’” (Cajori, 1915: 39).

Characterizing his ironically titled ‘A new refutation of time’ [1947; ‘after Bergson’] as an “anachronistic reductio ad absurdum of an obsolete system,” Borges (1999: 317) punctures such confidence in the defeat of Zeno. Already in his 1929 essay, ‘The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise,’ Borges (1999: 47) had declared that “Zeno is incontestable, unless we admit the ideality of space and time. If we accept idealism, … then we shall elude the mise en abîme of the paradox.” Perhaps idealism is itself incontestable: “And yet, and yet …” (Borges, 1999: 332). Recall, for instance, Dr Johnson’s response to “Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal” (Boswell, 1945: 130). As Boswell (1945: 130) relates: “though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus’.” From Diogenes to Johnson, hard-hitting refutations such as the refutatio ambulando scarcely keep our feet on the ground (Ingold, 2004). Hence Borges’s proposition:

Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature. We shall find them … in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno. … We have dreamt [the world] as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false. (Borges, 2000: 208)

Is Borges disingenuous in proposing that no idealist has sought out the unrealities that might confirm the hallucinatory nature of the world? The constraints of space and time allow us to do little more than gesture towards the neglected tradition of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century British idealism (Boucher & Vincent, 2012; Priest, 2022), with its particular stress on unreality. One should note more generally, with Dunham et al. (2011: 4), that “the idealist, rather than being anti-realist, is additionally a realist concerning elements more usually dismissed from reality. … Idealism … is not anti-realist, but realist precisely about the existence of Ideas.” Let us motion, therefore, towards McTaggart’s (1908, 1927) demonstration of the unreality of time; Bradley’s (1893) neo-Hegelian-cum-neo-Kantian speculations on the unreality of both space and time (Mander, 1994); Oakeley’s (1930, 1946–7) challenge to McTaggart and to Leibniz (Thomas, 2015); and Alexander’s (1920) cosmological divinations, which might be profitably considered alongside Whitehead’s (Collingwood, 1945; see also Brettschneider, 1964; Fisher, 2021; Stiernotte, 1954). To provide at least some detail, first consider Tiles’ (1989: 13) state-of-the-art reconstruction of Zeno’s paradoxes (after Owen, 1957–8). Against Aristotle’s emphasis, read it as a challenge to pluralism rather than motion: an assertion of the One, not the Many; a demonstration of the absurdities accruing from a failure to detect the underlying unity hidden by the diversity of the world of appearances, the world of experience.

  • Thesis I Neither space nor time are pluralities. For if they are pluralities it must be possible to specify the units (atomic parts) of which they are composed. But

  • Thesis II Any attempt to treat space or time as composed of atomic parts leads to absurd conclusions. For suppose they are composed of atomic parts, then a space or a time must either be divisible without limit or there must exist limits of division.

  1. (A)

    Suppose they are divisible without limit, then

    1. 1.

      a runner cannot complete a racecourse, and

    2. 2.

      Achilles cannot catch the tortoise.

  2. (B)

    Suppose there are limits of division, then either these have size (magnitude) or they do not.

    1. (a)

      Suppose they have size, then

      3. the paradox of the stadium.

    2. (b)

      Suppose they have no size, then

      4. the arrow paradox

Thus the alternatives lead to absurd conclusions, and neither space nor time are pluralities. (Tiles, 1989: 13)

Zeno’s paradoxes depend on time and space being countable (denumerable)—one step, two steps, ad infinitum—which is to say, divisible (halve, halve again, ad infinitum). Taking as read a certain familiarity with “the difficulties that have arisen from the continuity and the discreteness of space,” Bradley (1893) repeats what we may presume to be Zeno’s strategy in demonstrating, by means of a series of reductiones ad absurdum of opposing points of view, that space is mere appearance—unreal. Bradley (1893: 36) enquires of space per se “whether it contradicts itself”; setting out the issue “in the form which exhibits” not only “the root of the contradiction” but “also its insolubility”: to wit, “[s]pace is a relation—which it cannot be; and it is a quality or substance—which again it cannot be.” He proceeds to demonstrate, with equal conviction, that “[s]pace is not a mere relation”—“[b]ut space is nothing but a relation” (Bradley, 1893: 36 and 37, respectively). Bradley’s argument cuts across the longstanding debate between absolute (substantialist) and relative (relationalist) conceptions of space by means of a series of arguments concerning the infinite divisibility and infinite extension of space, ultimately leading us to conclude that space can be nothing other than the contradictory rational principles of the world qua appearance. Bradley’s parallel stance on the unreality of time, as Borges (1999: 331) puts it on his behalf, is “that if the now is divisible into other nows it is no less complicated than time, and, if it is indivisible, time is merely a relation between intemporal things.” Whereas Bradley “denies the parts in order to deny the whole” its reality (time as such; space as such), Borges (1999: 331) rejects “the whole in order to exalt each one of the parts.”

Lest this sense of unreality induces anxiety or provokes laughter, there is a parallel sense in which reality and unreality, materialism and idealism, matter and antimatter, are embroiled in the same logic. To approach things from another direction, the sense of unreality bequeathed by British idealism is no more (and no less) than what Lacan (2015: 52) refers to as “the inexplicable nature of the real”: the ‘real as impossible.’ This may seem at odds with the speculative spirit of Debaise and Stengers (2017), or those caught up in the wake of the ‘speculative realist’ turn (Bryant et al., 2011). Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari (1984: 27) directly rebut Lacan: “The real is not impossible; on the contrary, within the real everything is possible.” But as Lacan (2018: 112) notes: “A step had already been taken by Parmenides in this circle where, all in all, it is a matter of knowing what is involved in the real.” As Rosset (2012: vii) reminds us: “There is nothing more fragile than the human faculty for consenting to reality, for accepting unreservedly the imperious prerogative of the real.” Hence the proclivity for replacing the obdurate real with one of its purportedly more amenable doubles—which are nonetheless destined to ramify, not resolve, the original problems: to infinity and beyond!

When all is said and done, then, a certain something remains. But one cannot count on it, no matter how sure-footed one’s certainty appears to be. “[P]hilosophy has always started by taking a very curious form that it will never abandon, namely, the paradox,” says Deleuze (1980). Zeno, for example, “certainly knows that Achilles catches the tortoise. He certainly knows that the arrow hits the target.” So why does Zeno stubbornly refuse to listen to reason? “It’s not that the movement as a movement ‘is not’ as many commentators have him say. That’s foolish. It is that movement as movement cannot be thought. … A paradox states the unthinkability of a be-ing [étant]” (Deleuze, 1980). Sudden flash. Unthinking Geography. Unthinkable Geography. Perish the thought.