Abstract
There is another kind of spatial play that is characteristic of utopic praxis. This play is perhaps more difficult to grasp than that which simultaneously regulates and disturbs the island and city in order to get at the empty places, the terrae incognitae, in Utopia's text, revealed by the incongruity of their successive mappings. Later the concepts of social theory will bring them together in the text of history. This spatial play is not so easily glimpsed because the space it orders is neither geography (even if imaginary) nor geometry (even if non-Euclidean). It is the result of a former construction, itself the result of a careful and precise analytic reading. At each step of its discourse and movement what it has achieved is brought into this imaginary space raised to a second order. This space performs for the human sciences of today the function utopia performed for social reflection in the past: the space of a model.