We increasingly exist in places where our body is not, from second homes bearing our name to robots that extend the gestures of their designers. I propose to call deposited presence the presence we entrust to durable material things that keep it for us, and I analyse the very old pleasure it procures, as well as the asymmetry it installs between those who deposit and those who live around the deposits.
My friends’ house, and mine
Friends of mine own a house in Arles, close to the old town centre. They love it, they carry out work on it, and when they are there, they are there fully, welcoming, open to the city. But they live in Paris, and the house stays closed for most of the year. The other day, passing through while they were away, I walked past their home. The shutters were closed, the street was silent, and their name was written on the door. They were not there, and yet something of them held that place, occupied it, in the legal sense of the word as well as the affective one. When they are in Paris, they think about this house, they are happy to have it, it is part of their life. Their presence there is real for them, and invisible to the street.
I could stop at this scene and turn it into the portrait of a failing that would belong to others. That would be dishonest, because this story is also mine. I myself have owned two second homes, and in the village of Maine-et-Loire where one of them stood, friends, good friends we had known before settling there, reproached us for coming so rarely. The reproach could seem unfair, since that place mattered a great deal to me, I identified with it, I was happy with my presence in that village. But they and I were not talking about the same thing. I was living my presence, they were receiving my absence. Both were true at the same time, and it is this paradox of perception, two exact and incompatible experiences of the same place, that I would like to think through here.
Towns kept by the absent
What I lived through on the scale of a village, entire towns live through on the scale of their old quarters. In Saint-Malo, second and occasional homes now outnumber, within the ramparts, the dwellings inhabited year-round, and the population of the historic centre has been divided by five in forty years according to data from Insee, the French national statistics institute. In Arles, posters pasted in the streets in the summer of 2025 addressed visitors directly, “Tourist, your Airbnb is raising my rent.” Comparable situations could be found in Venice, in Lisbon, in Annecy, in coastal villages as in mountain ones, and in France roughly one dwelling in ten is a second home. The examples matter less than the structure, which is everywhere the same. Places of very strong symbolic charge are inhabited intermittently, by people sincerely attached to them, and this sum of sincere attachments produces streets of closed shutters.
The geographer Mathis Stock gave this mutation a framework in “L’hypothèse de l’habiter poly-topique”, a 2006 article published in the journal EspacesTemps.net. According to him, we live in societies of mobile individuals, where each of us has become the temporary inhabitant of several places rather than the permanent inhabitant of a single one, where familiarity with a place no longer depends on distance but on the frequency of stays, and where each of us seeks, for each practice, the place that suits it best, work here, rest there. He sums up this mode of dwelling in a formula I find very apt, “getting involved elsewhere, distancing oneself at home”. The anthropologist Jean-Didier Urbain, in Paradis verts, published in 2002, had described the same figure through fieldwork, that of the residential polygamist, the inhabitant who, between their places, has chosen not to choose, and of whom he says that nowadays “we no longer migrate, we double ourselves”. This doubling does not bear only on our movements, it bears on ourselves.
“Space is killed by the railway”
This doubling has material conditions, and they can be dated. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, travelling from Paris to Provence took several days by stagecoach, and one did not buy a house several days away from home in order to spend weekends there. People lived where they were. The poet Heinrich Heine grasped what was beginning in 1843, as the railway lines from Paris to Orléans and to Rouen were opening. “Space is killed by the railway,” he writes in Lutetia, “and we are left with time alone.” He added that he thought he could smell the linden trees of Germany at his door, and feel the North Sea breaking against it. The historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in The Railway Journey, published in 1977, showed that this sensation of the annihilation of space was the shared experience of the railway’s contemporaries, and that the train did not merely go faster, it tore places out of their remoteness, it made them available for the lives of people who lived elsewhere.
The French history of the railways adds a paradox to this picture, one that corrects the idea of a continuous progress of speed. At the turn of the 1930s, the French rail network comprised some 63,000 kilometres of lines, including more than 20,000 kilometres of local lines that irrigated the countryside down to the smallest towns. Around 28,000 kilometres remain in service today. The post-war years, cheap oil and the choice of the all-road policy closed more than half of the network, speed became concentrated on 2,700 kilometres of high-speed lines, and meanwhile, for lack of maintenance, classic lines such as Paris-Orléans or Paris-Clermont have had speed restrictions imposed on them that make certain journeys slower than their historic times, as the transport economist Patricia Pérennes has documented. The geographer Donald Janelle had proposed, as early as 1969, the concepts of space-time convergence and divergence to describe this double movement. Space does not shrink uniformly, it folds. Certain pairs of places draw closer while others drift apart, and the map of deposited presences follows these folds exactly, second homes concentrating wherever speed arrives.
Operating from New York on a patient in Strasbourg
The train shortened the journey of bodies. Telecommunications did something else, they made it possible to act without a journey. With the telephone, then the mobile phone, then video calling, we can ask a person to do something for us while they are doing it, guide them, correct their gesture, validate the result. Someone else’s hand becomes the extension of our body. Anyone who has guided a parent by video call through a computer setting, or remotely followed building work in their faraway house, has felt this strange experience of having hands seven hundred kilometres away.
This delegation of the gesture has a history, and it goes very far. On 7 September 2001, the surgeon Jacques Marescaux, based in New York, removed the gallbladder of a patient who was in Strasbourg, his hand movements transmitted by transatlantic link to the arms of a surgical robot. This operation, known as Operation Lindbergh, showed that a gesture as consequential as the surgical gesture could be accomplished by an absent body. And the next step, the one where the machine acts alone, was already old in people’s minds. As early as 1898, Nikola Tesla presented in New York a small boat controlled by radio waves, and imagined crewless war machines. During the First World War, the general staffs sought to remove the human being from flying machines, with the radio-controlled Aerial Target of the engineer Archibald Low in 1916, Sperry’s aerial torpedo in 1917, the Kettering Bug of 1918, and in France the pilotless flights of Captain Max Boucher in 1917, followed in early 1918 by a programme of “pilotless aircraft” launched at Clemenceau’s initiative. None of these machines was ever operational, and it is partly through this technical impossibility that the pilot remained in the military aircraft for a century. The contemporary drone is the belated accomplishment of this initial programme.
This genealogy sheds light on what a robot is. We picture it as an autonomous machine, an other that acts in our place. Its history says something else. The robot is born of remote control, and it is its extension carried to such a degree that the distance seems to have vanished, whereas it has become abyssal, to the point that we no longer see it. A so-called autonomous robot was designed, built and trained by humans, and when it acts alone, it is their deferred gesture that it accomplishes, a human presence deposited in the machine, which goes on acting without them. The chess-playing automaton built in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen, the Mechanical Turk that fascinated Europe and concealed a human player in its base, already displayed the structure of the desire at work. People wanted so badly to believe that a thing could act alone that they paid to contemplate a hoax. The fascination with the robot precedes the robot.
The wooden reel and the law of contiguity
Where does this fascination with disembodied action come from, and why do we take such keen pleasure in it? In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920, Freud describes his eighteen-month-old grandson playing with a wooden reel attached to a string. The child throws the reel out of his curtained cot while uttering a sound meaning “gone”, then pulls it back to him with a joyful “there”, and starts again tirelessly. Freud reads in this the way the child overcomes his mother’s absence, which he suffers, by replaying it on an object that he commands. To make something disappear and return at will, to reign over presence and absence by means of a thing and a thread, procures a deep pleasure because this mastery repairs the first powerlessness of our life. The telephone that summons a voice, the faraway house we reopen whenever we wish, the robot we send out and call back, extend the wooden reel. Our technologies of action at a distance are adult games of fort-da, and the pleasure they procure is the very archaic one of commanding absence.
In their A General Theory of Magic, published in 1902-1903, Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert show for their part that magic rests on laws of sympathy, among them the law of contiguity, according to which things that have once been in contact remain united at a distance, so that to act on one is to act on the other. To bewitch a person through their hair or their clothing is to mobilise this bond. Magic is first of all a technique of action at a distance, and Freud himself, in Totem and Taboo in 1913, linked it to the omnipotence of thoughts. Our technologies materially fulfil the programme that magic could only stage. To act where one is not, to have one’s gesture carried out by a distant hand, to remain bound to a thing one no longer touches, all this belongs to a very old human desire that technology has finally granted, and this is what explains why our machines retain something enchanted.
Deposited presence
I can now specify the concept I am proposing. I call deposited presence the presence a person entrusts to a durable material thing, which keeps it and manifests it in their absence. The second home is its most visible case, but the deposit of presence is everywhere. The desk that remains my desk at night, with my objects on it. The locker with my name on it. The donor’s plaque on the public bench. The grave, which is perhaps the archetypal form of the deposit, an engraved name holding a place for someone who will not return. And the robot, as we have just seen, which keeps and extends the gesture of those who formed it.
This concept connects with two notions I have proposed for other regimes of presence without a body. I have called functional presence, in The delicate presence of the metaverse, the presence we make effective through our social function without carrying our body there, and I analysed in Vocal presence the presences produced by the voice separated from the body. Those presences are carried by flows, they last as long as the connection lasts. Deposited presence has another property, it is carried by a thing that remains. The voice passes, the video call ends, the house stays, and this is what gives it its power as well as its gravity.
Three traits seem to me to define it. First, it works according to Mauss’s law of contiguity. The house I have inhabited, touched, arranged, remains united with me, and property law is at bottom the legal institutionalisation of this magical bond, the social guarantee that this thing goes on being me even when I am not there. The name on the door is its seal. Second, it is a sustained act and not a trace. A place where I merely lived long ago keeps a memory of me, which belongs to another regime, passive and sedimented. Deposited presence, for its part, is actively maintained, through the property title, the taxes paid, the building work, the thoughts, the periodic returns, and it withdraws when one stops maintaining it. Finally, it presentifies, in the sense the historian Louis Marin gave to the portrait of the king, which did not represent the monarch but made him exist as monarch, and which the anthropologist Carlo Severi finds again in ritual statues that do not depict a spirit but summon it. The house bearing my friends’ name does not signal their absence, it makes them exist in that street of Arles, as the portrait made the king exist in town halls he would never visit.
These three traits explain the paradox of perception with which I began. For the one who deposits, deposited presence is full, it nourishes them at a distance, it enlarges their existence. For the people who live around the deposit, it is an absence made permanent, maintained, guaranteed by law, and manifested every day by closed shutters. My friends in Maine-et-Loire were not receiving a share of my presence, they were receiving my instituted absence. No better communication between us would have dispelled this disagreement, because the asymmetry is constitutive of the deposit itself, which nourishes the depositor and imposes the hollow on those around.
Those who deposit and those who keep
We must then say who deposits, because not everyone can. The sociologist Vincent Kaufmann has proposed the concept of motility to designate a person’s potential for mobility, made up of access to means of transport, of skills to use them and of the capacity to project oneself into other places, and he shows that this potential is a form of capital, as unequally distributed as the others. Éric Le Breton, in Bouger pour s’en sortir, published in 2005, investigated those he calls the islanders, people durably assigned to narrow territories, for whom a journey of a few kilometres is an ordeal, and whose rare mobilities belong to constraint more than to choice. Social workers know those children of the northern districts of Marseille who have never seen the sea though it lies close by, those inhabitants of Seine-Saint-Denis who have never been to the Paris that the suburban train puts fifteen minutes away. And one can measure how socially structuring access to speed is by boarding an Ouigo, the low-cost high-speed trains launched in 2013, whose public resembles neither that of the classic TGV nor that of regional trains, proof in negative that the price of the ticket was sorting the bodies allowed into high speed.
Deposited presence is therefore also a social relation. On one side, the people whose existence extends over several places, who deposit their presence here and there and circulate between their deposits. On the other, those who are assigned to a single place, and who, when they live year-round in a desired town, find themselves moreover the keepers of the deposits of the former, living in streets whose walls belong to presences that do not come, and whose prices, driven up by the deposit value of housing, end up driving them out in turn. The measures towns are taking, caps on tourist rentals, surtaxes on second homes, act on this pressure. They do not exhaust the question, which is that of an asymmetry between lives lived in several places and lives lived in a single one, the latter bearing the cost of the former.
Where do we exist?
The empty houses are only the visible part of something much vaster. If a presence can be deposited, then we must ask where, in all, we exist. I exist in my body, here and now, but I also exist in my house when I am not there, in my office at night, in the objects I have arranged, in the texts that speak for me to strangers, in the images of me that circulate, in the machines I have configured and in the data I have left in them. I developed in Being and image the idea that the images we create and share produce in return our social being, and a profile picture does for each of us, modestly, what his portrait did for the king. The question “where am I?” no longer has a single answer, and the gap between the place of my body and the places of my existence seems to me one of the major anthropological facts of our time, whose manifestations can be followed in housing, in work, in images, in machines.
Picturing this archipelago to ourselves then becomes necessary, in the continuation of what I have called the geography of presence, that shifting cartography of our states of presence. Each of us now has a geography of our deposits, which we know poorly, and of which we measure neither what it gives us nor what it costs those who keep it.
I no longer have a country house. The village where I had deposited my presence for years has become for me a place among others, laden with memories but no longer holding me, and this experience of the lifted deposit taught me something that ownership was hiding from me. My presence there was not in the walls, it was in the sustained bond between the walls and me, and that bond committed, without my really seeing it, those who lived around. A deposited presence is never deposited in a thing alone, it is deposited with others, who keep it.
