This essay seeks to analyse some of the places in Jessica Schiefauers novel Bärarna. The analysis takes the form of a journey by depicting the various places in prose similar to that of the novel’s own, while analysing symbolism, places’ relation to the concept of limits, and the novel’s relation to Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopias. The main theoretic starting point for this essay is Foucault’s concept of heterotopia; that is, a certain type of place, which simultaneously mirrors and inverts society. The essay finds that a number of places in Bärarna can be defined as heterotopias, while others cannot. For example, the bathhouse is heterotopic because of its dismissal of sexual taboos, and the Bazaars have a number of heterotopic characteristics, such as their connection to time. On the other hand, Nikki’s apartment and the city of Irisburg have little heterotopic potential, but have other symbolic significance within the story. Lastly, the body is analysed from a spatial point of view. In Bärarna, bodies are often described as landscapes and rooms. This aspect is put forward alongside Foucault's “utopian body”, in which the body appears as a place with the ability to house other places inside of it – as is also sometimes the case with the heterotopia.

Le corps utopique au cinéma dont il est ici question ne désigne pas un objet de pensée emprunté à Michel Foucault et appliqué à quelques corps dématérialisés ou extraordinaires à l'écran, mais un outil heuristique pour envisager les modalités historiques et esthétiques à travers lesquelles le corps des images informe les images du corps et leur confère une dimension critique – se retournant alors tout autant vers la technologie qui les incarne, pour en révéler les puissances et les fictions, que vers le corps objectivé des sciences dont elles éprouvent les limites. C'est l'empreinte lumineuse des coureurs de la station physiologique de Marey qui déjoue l'invisible du mouvement à travers ses strates superposées, et les projections fantasmagoriques qui convoquent la présence des morts au sein des vivants. Ce sont aussi les horizons cinématiques ouverts par la théorie de la relativité et mis en œuvre par le cinéma – jusque dans sa manière de filmer le corps sportif pour saisir les temporalités intimes de l'effort et de l'extase. Ce sont enfin les zoomorphismes d'un cinéma contemporain, occupé à déjouer l'anthropocentrisme des images. Chacune de ces utopies – transparence, réversibilité, hybridité – déploie simultanément une virtualité du corps et de l'image en redistribuant les modalités de leur analogie : dans les images spectrales des sciences et de la fantasmagorie, le corps est à la fois visible et invisible ; dans la variation expérimentale des vitesses de l'image et du montage, il échappe au flux temporel ; dans la tentative de déjouer le regard anthropocentré du cinéma, il absout ses frontières pour se métamorphoser en entité hybride. Notre réflexion se situe ainsi à l'interface d'une anthropologie des images du corps, d'une esthétique du film et d'une archéologie de ses techniques. / The utopian body in film, under discussion in this thesis, does not refer to an object of thought borrowed from Michel Foucault and applied to some dematerialised or extraordinary bodies on the screen, but to a heuristic tool for considering the historical and aesthetic modalities through which the cinematic body put a critical focus on both the fictional powers of cinema techniques and the presumed objectivity of scientific imagery. Such bodily utopia is manifest in Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographic prints, which foil the invisibility of movement through their superimposed strata, and in magic lanterns and fantascopes, which invest the living with spectral presence. It is also apparent in the cinematic horizons opened by the theory of relativity and implemented by the cinema – the manner, for example, of filming the athlete’s body in order to capture the intimate temporalities of effort and ecstasy. Finally it is present in the zoomorphism of contemporary cinema, occupying and frustrating the anthropocentrism of images. Each of these utopias – transparency, reversibility, hybridity – simultaneously deploy the virtuality of bodies and of images, redistributing the logics of their analogy: in the spectral images of the sciences and the phantasmagoria, the body is at once visible and invisible; in the experimental variation of the speed of image and montage, the body escapes temporal flux; in the attempt to circumvent the anthropocentric gaze of the cinema, the body absolves its own frontiers in order to metamorphose into a hybrid entity. This reflection is therefore situated at the interface of an anthropology of images of the body, an aesthetics of the cinema and an archaeology of its techniques.