It is entirely fitting that there is no simple or self-evident approach, no clear path, to the topic of the desert. We can grasp it as a natural wilderness or as a barren wasteland, as an ecology sometimes unusually rich in life and surprisingly fragile, as an idea of geographical extremity or alterity, as a sacred or accursed site, as a metaphor for nullity, as a subjective or existential terrain, or as an object of sheer aesthetic exultation. This book moves freely between these and other conceptions of the desert. I remain guided throughout, however, by a set of philosophical texts, beginning with the work of Nietzsche, in which the desert is figured principally as a speculative topology, a place of thought where an exhausted metaphysical tradition can imagine its self-overcoming. An immediate objection may be that this philosophical topology is not a real desert but a mere metaphor or rhetorical strategy, one concocted, furthermore, by a Western subjectivity ill equipped for life in desert places. The objection is legitimate, but my response – on which this entire project rests – is twofold.

First, it is not at all obvious where the distinction between the real and rhetorically constructed desert lies. Even scientists have noted the problem of comprehensively determining what a ‘real’ desert is – as one scientific text puts it, ‘no single, conclusive ecological definition of the term “desert” has been accepted’. In any case, all places are, to one extent or another, rhetorical or semiotic constructions. Deserts seem especially so precisely because they challenge life's ability to make a place for itself. They thus tend to put our conceptions of place and belonging into question.