The Territory as a Subject

This chapter reflects on research and teaching experiences - reading, interpretation and design - conducted in recent years, where the questions raised by the idea of the territory-subject and their controversies have emerged regularly and with severity, without ever retreating. It is as if it were no longer possible to go backwards but only to advance, even with difficulty, within the radical recontextualisation of the territory-subject and territorial subjectivation. In this approach, I include all the indeterminacies and problematic issues contained within the process, and that emerge with the ambiguity of the very term “subject” (sujectum-subjectus, as Étienne Balibar recalls) (Balibar, 2012). At the same time, the subject is individual, anthropological-political, but also subjected and subjugated, placed underneath. It is relational and not abstract (Pelluchon, 2020), a material, textured and bodily relationship, which exchanges with the other subjects. The text expands the one published with the same title in Marta De Marchi, Hessam Khorasani Zadeh (Eds), Territori post-rurali/Territoires post-ruraux. Genealogie e prospettive / Généalogies et perspectives, Rome, Italy: Officina Edizioni, 2020