There and Away

Rainer Nagele's There and Away charts a series of autobiographical topographies or "e;topobiographies"e; that map a life beginning in a working-class village in Liechtenstein to the places he traveled as an emigre, student, and scholar (Innsbruck, Gottingen, Paris, California, Baltimore). Located at the nexus of Freud's elaboration of the child's game of fort (away) and da (there) and Benjamin's thought-images of his Berlin childhood, the eight placed-based vignettes of There and Away do not tell a life story but rather bring together momentary traces of encounters into a constellation, in which aspects of Nagele's life became legible to him while illuminating wider historical configurations.Nagele's topobiographies emerge from encounters and re-encounters with memories of specific places as they interact with significant texts by Friedrich Holderlin, Paul Celan, and Walter Benjamin. There and Away thus meditates on what it means to return to the same places and the same texts at different points in time, each encounter at once familiar and revealing something utterly unique.