The Architectural Other

Abstract

Jacques Lacan defines the Other as the linguistic superstructure of the unconscious. It is the collective network of relations into which the subject is inserted, as the subject is inserted into language. It is the matrix of laws, rules and customs that define the subject. The individual subject finds itself inserted into the symbolic order, the field of the Other, which is the unconscious, and which determines the reality, identity, and desire of the subject. What effect does collective life have on the psyche of the individual? Does collective life (civilization) have its discontents? Architecture is managed by committees, writers, and media spokespeople. What is the role of the individual in the collective life of architecture? Architecture enacts a struggle between the maintenance and dislocation of the individual and collective life. How does the struggle between maintenance and dislocation, individual psyche and collective Other, play out in buildings and cities?

Keywords:

• Jacques Lacan
• Peter Eisenman
• architecture
• psychoanalysis
• unconscious
• collective life

Notes

1. Lorens Eyan Holm, “Aldo Rossi and the Field of the Other,” in Architecture and the Unconscious, ed. John Shannon Hendrix and Lorens Eyan Holm (London: Routledge, 2016), 101, 113, 110.

2. Peter Eisenman, “Architecture and the Problem of the Rhetorical Figure,” in Eisenman Inside Out, Selected Writings 1963–1988 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 203.

3. Peter Eisenman, Diagram Diaries (New York: Universe Publishing, 1999), 37.

4. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 286.

5. Peter Eisenman, Re:Working Eisenman (London: Academy Editions, 1993), 16.

6. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’Oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” in Sociologie et Anthropologie, ed. Marcel Mauss (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), xix, quoted in Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987), 74.

7. Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’Oeuvre de Marcel Mauss,” xxxii.

8. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 144.

9. Jacques Lacan, “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 49.

10. Ibid., 86.

11. Eisenman, “Architecture and the Problem of the Rhetorical Figure,” 203.

12. Jacques Lacan, “Aggressivity in psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 22.

13. Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, 58.

14. Ibid., 6.

15. Dews, Logics of Disintegration, 99.

16. Jacques Lacan, “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the freudian unconscious,” in, Écrits, a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 313.

17. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 28.

18. Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, 54.

19. Peter Eisenman, Eisenman Inside Out, 204.

20. Jacques Lacan, “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the freudian unconscious,” in Écrits, a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 299.

21. Ibid., 316.

22. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994 [1930]), 20.

23. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 163.

24. Peter Eisenman, Eisenman Inside Out, 186.

25. Eisenman, Re:Working Eisenman, 12.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Hendrix

John Hendrix has been a professor of art and architectural history at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island, for twenty years. He has also taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence College, Rhode Island College, the University of Connecticut, and John Cabot University in Rome, and was a research professor at the University of Lincoln in the UK for eight years. Among other books, he is the author of Unconscious Thought in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis and Architecture and Psychoanalysis: Peter Eisenman and Jacques Lacan, and the co-editor of Architecture and the Unconscious with Lorens Holm.