Argentina appears not as a place with a fixed existential meaning, but as a location whose distance and significance depend on the projects by which people situate themselves. The contrast between exile and an internationalist’s world shows how freedom gives facticity its meaning: the country can be a faraway obstacle or simply another center of the world.

Argentina as Distance and Exile

The passage introduces an emigrant preparing to leave France for Argentina after his political party has failed. When someone remarks that Argentina is very far away, he asks, “Far from what?” The question interrupts the assumption that distance is an intrinsic property of the destination. Argentina seems far to people in France because an implicit national project has made France their valued place; without that project, the comparison has no self-evident force.

The same destination takes on a different meaning for an internationalist revolutionary, to whom Argentina is a center of the world like any other country. If a catastrophe instead forces someone to leave a France first constituted as an absolute home, Argentina can appear as a distant land of exile. The country has not changed: what changes is the project through which the emigrant apprehends the departure and the place left behind.

Place, Projects, and Obstacles

The example illustrates the argument that freedom does not encounter obstacles as ready-made meanings. A place becomes an impediment in relation to a desire or chosen end. By positing an end as difficult or inaccessible, a person makes a location appear as resistance; by establishing practical relations among objects, freedom also organizes distance, measurement, and the techniques by which it may be crossed. Restriction is not the opposite of freedom here: choice entails selection and elimination, and freedom exists by taking up facticity as its own restriction.

The discussion contrasts two projects centered on Mont-de-Marsan. For a minor government official who projects a journey to New York, the town may seem to block the desired departure. Yet the very project of going to New York situates him at Mont-de-Marsan, and determines how the town relates to New York and China. If his project were instead to become a wealthy farmer there, Mont-de-Marsan would emerge against a comparatively undifferentiated world. The project changes the place’s connections and the world in which it appears.

A Point of Departure

Even the project of going to New York can have sharply different meanings. It may function only as an indirect way of choosing oneself as discontented with Mont-de-Marsan. In that case, the town remains the center of concern, and the proposed journey expresses a continuing withdrawal from the place one inhabits; it appears as an insurmountable obstacle. Or the journey may be a project in which the person is wholly engaged. Then Mont-de-Marsan is no longer merely an attachment or barrier but a point of departure: reaching New York necessarily begins somewhere.

This difference makes the person responsible for the meaning of a contingent location. Birth places a person somewhere, but the passage insists that the place taken is also assumed through freedom. Without facticity there would be no situated condition for choice; without freedom that condition would not be disclosed and would have no meaning. Argentina’s contrast between homeland-relative distance and internationalist centrality condenses this mutual dependence: place matters through a project, while projects take shape from a place.