Virginia L. Blum

Where's the Difference? The Heterosexualization of Alterity in Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Lacan

It has been largely overlooked that Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space draws heavily upon Lacanian psychoanalytic accounts of the emergence of subjectivity in theorizing political relations, Lefebvre implicitly repudiates at the same time that he builds upon Lacans distinctions between real, imaginary, and symbolic registers of subjectivity. For Lefebvre, Lacans registers give primacy to visuality and heterosexualized familial dynamics while lived material, spatial, and political experience arc incidental to subject formation and systems of meaning Lefebvre transforms Lacans registers by historicizing them in spatially dialectical terms, loosely replacing them with distinct forms of evolutionary spatialities which he calls natural, absolute, and abstract, In the process, he both subverts and reproduces Lacans paternal–maternal (heterosexual) order. We hold that Lefebvrcs critique provides powerful theoretical tools for understanding how alterity and signification are always and inevitably politically and materially mediated through corporealities and ‘space’. Nonetheless, Lefebvre can only work out his spatial dialectic of history in heterosexist terms: although he usefully identifies maternal–paternal metaphors in different Western social formations over time, he fails to interrogate directly the very hetero-sexuality that gives these metaphors their relational significance and force. In short, he brings us to the brink of a nonheterosexist domain, but never enters it. In this paper then, we outline the striking parallels in the theoretical frameworks of Lefebvre and Lacan in order to illustrate how both theorists focus on gender construction as the fundamental social process through which alterity is achieved. At the same time, we unpack the underlying phallocentrism and heterosexism that sustain their versions of alterity, subjectivity, and agency, in the process showing how Lefebvre deftly undermines the apolitical stance of Lacan. In conclusion, we strive to recuperate the crucial liberatory aspects of Lefebvres project through considering how we might go on to dislocate received versions of capitalism and sexual difference.

Psychotopologies: Closing the Circuit between Psychic and Material Space

In this paper we present an argument for a psychoanalytic understanding of space. While Freud struggled to move away from his own early prepsychoanalytic attempts at mapping the psyche through cerebral localization, he nevertheless found himself compelled to use spatial language and topographical models throughout his career. In his ambivalence, Freud emphasized that the space of the psyche should be read as no more than metaphorical. We argue that the topographical models that Freud struggled with were constrained by the metrics of Euclidean space. The psyche is spatial, just not in topographical terms. For Jacques Lacan many of the psychic operations that Freud described (such as the transference) are better understood in terms of topological operations. Lacan uses such figures as the torus, the cross-cap, and the Möbius strip to demonstrate how the subject is formed through internal exclusions and external inclusions. Using Freuds famous case of the Rat Man, we argue that the neurotics journey shows him seeking to overcome a psychospatial problem, one that resembles a topological conundrum. Through the Rat Mans story, we demonstrate how Lacans topology of the subject (the R-schema as cross-cap) accounts for the Möbius twist that allows the neurotic to situate people, events, and places that are apparently separated in time and space in the same place. Ultimately, we consider the usefulness of topology over Euclidean space for building an understanding of space that is at once psychic and material.