Spatiality First
Résumé
Since the beginning of the twenty-first, francophone geography has shown a growing interest in spatiality, considered as the set of practices, skills and imaginations that allow any individual to regulate his or her relations of distance to other individuals and to social realities. This is becoming central to many research works and reflects the increasing attention of geographers to the individual dimension of spatial facts. Many of these researches transpose philosophical theories, such as those allowing to think about the individual, or/and the status of experience. In this paper, the author postulates, drawing inspiration from Charles Taylor’s approaches, that spatiality can be considered as expressing the spatial dimension of the self. He then attempts to propose an analysis of the consequences of such a hypothesis. He shows, by relying in particular on the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt, that this leads geography to better analyze its proximity to the human sciences (especially philosophy), to recognize its significance as a political anthropology of inhabited space, and to assume its status as ethical knowledge.