Abstract
We will confront the parable directly: there is movement from map as analogic model of its object, and which reduces its object according to a predictable measured scale to map as a "double" of the Empire, its "other." This movement goes from representation to the utopia of representation; at the same time the represented object is converted to its simulacrum, unlocatable because it is the map in its complete correspondence to the Empire, yet different from it. Rather, the Empire is different from the map, because it remains, whereas the map is discarded. This gap is very strictly the place of the neutral. The practice of this difference is utopic. This is so because maps of a city, country, or continent — no matter what the scale, how reduced, or what has been erased or included — always implicitly functions as a double. They are diagramatic repre-sentations and schemata whose syntax (its rules of reduction and selection) is explicit, but forgotten in nature once our gaze settles on it in its multiple circuitry: "As we perceive the thing signified from its sign, it is clear that we do not mean that this sign is really other than what it signifies. We simply mean that it is other as a sign and figure. Thus we say directly and unqualifyingly…of a map of Italy that it is Italy."2 The expression commented on in 1683 by the logicians of Port-Royal, and the gap between the meaning of the figure and the "expression" of the thing itself, are the themes of the parable "quoted" by J. L. Borgès.