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Periscope down! charting masculine sexuation in submarine films
... 6 Even if no one pictures enjoyment as a question raised by Lefebvre and Lacan, this is by far the first geographic contribution to Lacanian enjoyment. Paul Kingsbury (2005) pictures the "politics of enjoyment" regarding Jamaican tourism, Jesse Proudfoot (2010) gives an example of enjoyment as "extradiscursive" by reflecting on interviews during an international soccer competition in Vancouver, and Proudfoot and Kingsbury (2014) have published a work on "phallic jouissance" by focusing on masculine sexuation in submarine films, to mention just a few essential works. ...
In a recently published manuscript, Henri Lefebvre develops the notion of an “architecture of enjoyment” (l’architecture de la jouissance). Surprisingly, he does not mention Jacques Lacan, although it was Lacan who originally introduced the term jouissance to academic discourse. This chapter uses this previously unknown manuscript of Lefebvre as a unique starting point to exemplify a different reading of Lefebvre and Lacan. Pohl discusses the basics of their notions of enjoyment, while giving special attention to the latter’s political implications and ways to grasp architecture in its relation to the production of space. Finally, Pohl’s chapter seeks to outline the possi- bilities of an architectural enjoyment. By focusing on vertical architectures, particularly Ballard’s novel High-Rise and a 2014 Frankfurt building deto- nation, Pohl’s claim is that a discussion of Lefebvre and Lacan can assist in grasping architectural enjoyment to better understand the utopian fantasies and the constitutive lacking structure that haunts a building.
This chapter explores survivalism as one aspect of response to apocalyptic discourses. Survivalism demonstrates the operation of fort-da—a repeated fantasy of control over presence and absence which serves as an anchor for enjoyment. A danger of lurid descriptions of potential climate catastrophe is that they may enable a fantasy of survival and rebuilding which serves to distance subjects from collective efforts to preserve Earth. The post-apocalyptic survival is intoxicating because it promises access to the impossible, unmediated Real. Dramatic survivalist plans illustrate this argument, especially those espoused by Silicon Valley executives whose resources, money, and social power would be necessary for an effective mitigation of climate change if indeed such a thing is still possible.
The current epoch is often described by cultural theorists as facing an ontological turn with regard to the question of nature. In the Anthropocene, ‘Mother Nature’ makes space for ‘Gaia’, a nature that is inseparably related to culture. In turn, Gaia has vehemently been criticized as a harmonious figure of whole-ism. Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework, this paper traces the shift from Nature to Gaia through Jacques Lacan's ‘formulas of sexuation’. From a Lacanian standpoint, sexual difference paves the way towards two different ways of relating nature and culture. Addressing the case of ruination, the author engages with the two underlying ontologies taking place in debates on nature: the narrative of Mother Nature based on a ‘masculine’ ontology, and the notion of Gaia as following a ‘feminine’ ontology. The paper concludes by outlining a feminine reading of the Anthropocene that captures nature and culture as ruined and immanently out of joint.
There is a broad consensus that psychoanalytic theory cannot offer an account to further engage with the ontological turn toward the object that human sciences face today. In particular, the structuralist side of psychoanalysis, most prominently promoted by Jacques Lacan, is supposed to be unable to grasp an object independently from the subject. Against this background, it is no surprise that ‘object-oriented’ geographers ignore psychoanalytic theory. My aim is to investigate the interstices between the object-oriented turn and Lacanian psychoanalysis. I argue that the critiques miss a crucial aspect of Lacan’s ontology: he does not question that there are objects located ‘out there’, but rather adds that psychoanalysis engages with another object whose location remains uncertain. I follow Lacan’s most important invention, the object a, to argue that this object is crucial to understanding the ontology of Lacan as an ‘object-disoriented’ ontology. While object-oriented approaches in cultural geography give ontological priority to the material conditions of existence, Lacanian ontology allows us to understand how material objects become spectralized through an immaterial surplus. To substantiate this claim, I explore the role of anxiety with regard to the Sathorn Unique Tower, an abandoned skyscraper sitting in the middle of Bangkok. Widely known as the ‘Ghost Tower’, this ruin is internationally considered to be haunted. By focusing on a movie and an interview about the Ghost Tower as well as my own ethnographic observation of it, I not only explore the topological dimension of the ghost but also demonstrate that it is precisely the impossibility of localization that enables an object to disorientate the subject.
Current influential attempts to bring together psychoanalysis and Marxism turn on the question of how to critique and move beyond capitalism without reverting to a utopian notion of communism. Taking this question seriously, the article explores the implications of psychoanalytic categories such as the real, fantasy, jouissance, and the formulae of sexuation, for Marxian economics and politics. Rethinking Marxism in conjunction with Lacanian psychoanalysis, the article aims to formulate a post-phantasmatic relation to the economy of surplus, and from there, to offer a new ethico-political stance around exploitation and communism.Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2005) 10, 79–97. doi:10.1057/palgrave.pcs.2100028
This article illustrates how the works of Slavoj Žižek can advance the field of emotional geographies, as well as our understandings of emotion, space, and society. Žižek provides a rich social theoretical vocabulary that can help explain cultural discontent, how emotional worlds bond and fall apart, why there is no guaranteed harmony in love with our partner, and how emotional worlds are organized in ways so that people can hold onto something that resembles ‘subjectivity’ and ‘reality’. I focus on geographers’ interpretations of Jacques Lacan's notion of jouissance: a concept that is at the heart of Žižek's writings. First, I consider how geographers’ canonical portrayals of Lacan as the arch phallogocentric thinker rely on what Žižek calls the “false poetry of castration”. Second, I address how Žižek's notion of enjoyment (his usual translation of jouissance) as the “paradoxical payment” informs his critical engagement with Marxism, as well as questions about the political and emotional. I then turn to discuss how the irruptions of enjoyment can take place amidst spaces of nationalism and consumption. The article concludes by affirming the prospect of making emotional geographies less enjoyable than ever before.