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Abstract
It is tempting to construct theory about the Other using binary oppositions. Lacanian psychoanalysis avoids this by stressing the geometry of the Borromeo knot, whose three rings embody both sequentiality and self-intersection. This essay organizes Lacan’s topological options around a “secondary virtuality” by (1) considering Mladen Dolar’s expanded account of anamorphosis, (2) connecting the architectural void to the problem of non-enclosure of the standard figures of projective geometry immersion – the Möbius band, cross-cap, and Klein bottle - and (3) taking Pappus’s theorem, the origin of projective geometry, to the twisted and folded spaces of the uncanny, where unheimlich (“un-homely”) directly implicates architecture as an agency of topological transformation. Two examples, Chesterton’s “The Queer Feet” (1911) and the 1951 science-fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, demonstrate the continued relevance of Pappus’s idea of secondary virtuality to Lacan’s correlation of the Other and ‘extimacy’.
Notes
1. Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, Seminar II, 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991), 109. For Lacan’s explicit parsing of Freud’s Wo Es war, see “The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), 347.
2. Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimity,” The Symptom 9, Lacan Dot Com, https://www.lacan.com/symptom/extimity.html. Miller begins his exposition by describing the way the exterior, A, is present within the interior, meaning that the intimate is “Other–like,” i.e. a parasite. Miller immediately applies this to the situation of analysis, the privacy of the consulting room. Here, “the extimacy of the subject is the Other.” Miller quickly sees that there is a complement, where a is at the same time inside A, citing Lacan’s early teaching, that “the other of the other of the signifier is the Other of the law.” But, Miller then immediately realizes that extimity extends to Lacan’s later opposition to the previous Lacan. Thus, extimity extends to Lacan’s distinctive teaching style. His lessons are no longer to be understood “at the level of the signified” (sensus, explicit and easy meaning) but as sententia, a “deep understanding of meaning.” Miller, like many of Lacan’s commentators, connects the objet petit a to jouissance, the pleasure–pain associated with lack and desire. This is my justification for labelling Figure 1 with A’s adding to an exterior but then penetrating a at the innermost point. Each bracket is a combination of opposing forces, movement (act) and containment (framing). But, with every successive framing there is the potential of self–intersection and, thus, non-orientation.
3. Georges Perec, A Void, trans. Gilbert Adair (Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 2005).
4. See Paola Mieli and Jacques Houis, Figures of Space: Subject, Body, Place (New York: Agincourt Press, 2017).
5. Stijn Vanheule, “Lacan’s Construction and Deconstruction of the Double-Mirror Device,” Frontiers in Psychology 2 (2011): 209.
6. Lorens Holm, “What Lacan Said Re: Architecture,” Critical Quarterly 42, no. 2 (July 2000): 29. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8705.00286.
7. Mladen Dolar, “Anamorphosis,” S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique 8 (2015): 125. Available online: http://www.lineofbeauty.org/index.php/S/article/viewFile/66/85.
8. Jurgis Baltrušaidis, Anamorphoses, ou Perspective curieuses (Paris: O. Perrin, Jeu savant, 1955).
9. I wish to express my appreciation to Mr. Alireza Moharrer for introducing me to the history of projective geometry. A useful introductory text is H. S. M. Coxeter, Projective Geometry, 2nd ed. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987).
10. It would be hard to find a more elegant or exact statement of the problem than Lorens Holm’s: “[Architecture] might enclose this emptiness literally, in the sense that if architecture is about creating enclosure … then this enclosure encloses emptiness. Except that if it is literal, then the emptiness must always escape, like the tomato seed which always skitters away when we put our finger on it. And if not literally, then the architecture activity (the will to architecture corresponding to the thrust of the drive), then this activity is itself a double gesture, both a compulsive acknowledgement and screening out of originary loss and traumatic encounter with the real.” (Holm, “What Lacan Said Re: Architecture”., 33).
11. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Seminar VII, 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 135.
12. Lacan, Ethics, 60.
13. Ibid., 137.
14. Ben Wright, dir., Slavoj Žižek: The Reality of the Virtual, 2003. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBRToxGyKZo.
15. Ernst Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen,” Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 8, no. 22 (August 26, 1906): 195; and 8, no. 23 (September 1, 1906): 203.
16. Slavoj Žižek, Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); Sex and the Failed Absolute (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
17. P. G. Wodehouse’s creation of the perfect manservant in his “Jeeves and Wooster” stories tells the tale. It is the valet Jeeves who defends and supports the master-servant relationship by activating, as Lacan described in his discourse matheme, the servant’s responsibility for S2…S2 systems of knowledge covered by fantasies of appearances. Wooster is actually a would-be egalitarian at points, but Jeeves ensures that the Master is forever confined by the irony of sublation: that any one master must contend with other masters over who gets “to signify the most,” producing the system of hierarchical class divisions. P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves and Wooster Omnibus (London: Penguin, 2001).
18. The word “acousmatic” better describes how anamorphosis can work with sound as well as light. See Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
19. For background on my use of “acousmatics,” see Dolar, Ibid., 60.
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Don Kunze
Don Kunze taught architecture studio, theory, general arts criticism, and seminars on theory, film, and landscape architecture at Penn State, University at Buffalo, Temple University, University of the Arts, Cranbook Academy, the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University, Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center (Virginia Tech.); and conducted workshops at the University of Pennsylvania, South Dakota State University, Frankfort University of Applied Sciences, and Carleton University. He is the author of a book on Giambattista Vico and maintains on-line publications dealing with psychoanalysis, virtuality, the uncanny, and critical theory. He is currently working on a novel about an academic-slash-psychotherapist treating an architect who dreams about hysterical houses.