A erosão da experiência e a impossibilidade do lugar:

um diálogo entre Maria Rita Kehl e Yi-Fu Tuan

Abstract

Contemporary life is marked by a paradoxical sensation of excess of events and profound emptiness of meaning. This theoretical essay proposes a dialogue between Maria Rita Kehl’s psychoanalytic critique of the concept of “experience” and Yi-Fu Tuan’s humanistic geography regarding the formation of ”place”. The objective is to demonstrate that the constitution of a “geopsychic place” — space endowed with value and meaning — depends on a temporality that allows for the symbolic elaboration of lived events, transforming occurrences into experience. It is argued that the acceleration of time, by imposing a rhythm that privileges stimulus and succession at the expense of reflection and sedimentation, atrophies this capacity for elaboration. According to Kehl, the contemporary subject accumulates lived events but rarely converts them into experience. The conclusion is that, without the temporality of experience, space cannot be transformed into place, resulting in a subject who inhabits a world of scenarios but feels chronically uprooted and ”placeless”. Finally, a pedagogy of transformation is proposed to reclaim temporalities of care and spatial anchoring as a collective mental health strategy.