Culture Machine, September 2005 Marc Augé (2004) Oblivion. Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-3567-6. Les Roberts Marjolijn de Jager‟s translation of Marc Augé‟s Oblivion follows on from other recent translations of French theoretical texts that share something of a family resemblance with Augé‟s work. In The Dialectic of Duration, Bachelard challenges the Bergsonian notion of time as duration (durée), arguing that lived time is essentially fractured, interrupted and „teemed with lacunae‟ (2000: 19). As with Lefebvre‟s late writings on rhythmanalysis (2004; Lefebvre and Régulier 2003), Bachelard posits a dialectical temporality made up of rhythms and discontinuities. Having only recently been made available to Anglophone readers, these works – by authors more prominently known for their writings on space rather than time – invite certain comparisons with Augé‟s dialectic of memory and oblivion. Indeed Oblivion may be looked upon as a „mapping‟, of sorts, of precisely the temporal lacunae and discontinuities of which Bachelard speaks. My use of a geographical metaphor here is intended on the one hand to bring to the fore some of the spatial implications of Augé‟s thesis – and in this regard comparisons with his earlier work on non-places (1995), or his more recent Le temps en ruines (2003) prove instructive –, and, on the other, to counter the (a)spatial essentialism of the Bergsonian durée, in which space is subordinated to a temporal logic of flow and continuity; an instrumental logic that informs the radical deterritorialisations of the „rhizome‟ and „nomad‟. For Lefebvre, these critical tendencies serve to reduce the dialectics of space and time to little more than „superimposed fluxes‟ (1976: 34). As products of what arguably amounts to an abstract space (Lefebvre 1991) of „ungrounded‟ displacement, the open and contingent „mobilities‟ of anti-foundational epistemologies of the subject are secured at the cost of a closed and static idealisation of the spatial: „an absolutist spatial ontology... provides the missing foundation for everything else in flux‟ (Smith and Katz 1993: 79). Coming from a social anthropological perspective, Augé‟s observation that „it is the relations between space and otherness that should be addressed and analyzed today if we are to point up some of the contradictions of our modernity‟ (1998:97) points to similar concerns in respect of the failure to adequately