Mantenere libera la soglia dalla geografia dei non-luoghi, alla necessità dei luoghi-di-non

Keeping the threshold free. From the “on-places” to the “places-of- not”1 – This paper intends to provide a reflection on the problem and the concept of “non-place”, establishing connections between the re- search of Marc Augé and the Walter Benjamin’s studies on the Arca- des of Paris. My purpose is to read Benjamin’s Parisian Arcades as prototypes of the Augé’s non-places, not imposing one thought on the other, and being aware of the intellectual and theorical distances between the two authors. The methodology is, in the way of Walter Benjamin, to build constellations of thought, for studying and delineating a spe- cific problem. The proposal of this paper is to develop an overcoming of the non-places’s concept and problem through the definition of a concept that could be called “place-of-non”: it could be explained as a threshold – like the Arcades and the non-places – but freed from the domain of commodities and capitalism.