Andrew Payne_Architecture, Lacan, and Deleuze

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s of Harvard College, 2013. All rights reserved.

Architecture LAcAn DeLeuze

“Architecture Lacan Deleuze” is an essay in two parts. In the first part, “‘Man is a Fatal Disease of the Animal’: Lacan,” I take Michael Hays’s 2009 book, Architecture’s Desire, as the occasion for a reconsideration of the interest of Lacan’s teachings for the contemporary theory and practice of architecture. This reconsideration places Lacan’s two discussions of architecture in his seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, in the context of a conceptual constellation that includes: demand, desire, drive, sublimation, das Ding, creatio ex nihilo, and jouissance.

The essay’s second part, “Perhaps Architecture Begins with the Animal: Deleuze and Guattari” examines the occasional discussions of architecture advanced by two of Lacan’s most consequentially heterodox students, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and, on the basis of that examination, attempts to do three things: to clarify the differend that divides Lacan from Deleuze and Guattari, to

reveal the extent to which that differend is symptomatic of more pervasive and wide-ranging divisions within contemporary thought, and to specify the interest of these divisions for the discussion of architecture in our at once biopolitical and posthuman present. As we will see, that differend turns on Deleuze and Guattari’s rejection of two concepts central to the Lacanian enterprise, the subject and the symbolic. In the conclusion to this second part, I will use the work of the contemporary philosopher Jacques Rancière (in whose thinking of the relationship between art and politics the concepts of the subject and the symbolic retain a central role) in order to clarify what I understand to be the political implications of Lacan’s defense of these concepts.I will then use the work of the contemporary architect and architectural theorist Pier Vittorio Aureli to unpack the implications of Lacan and Rancière’s respective commitments to the concepts of the subject and the symbolic for thinking about architecture.

AnDrew pAyne

2 Architecture Lacan Deleuze

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whither Desire?Despite the prominence that the term “desire” enjoyed in end-of-millennium discussions of architecture, today it has all but disappeared from our disciplinary vocabulary. Not that the claims once made on behalf of it were ever repudiated. No, desire’s eclipse is less the product of any explicit rejection than a result of its progressive assimilation to an at once vitalist and eudaimonic vocabulary of pleasure, sensation, and affect. It seems that our post- or late-modern preoccupation with the vicissitudes of desire (and so with the forms of distance and mediation that this term implies) has transformed more or less imperceptibly in recent years into a preoccupation with the vicissitudes of enjoyment (and so with the oceanic intimacy and immediacy that this term implies). Needless to say, the title of Michael Hays’s most recent book, Architecture’s Desire,2 has a somewhat anachronistic resonance in this new intellectual atmosphere.

For the tradition that stands in the background of this book, a tradition that extends from Hegel via Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite to Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan, “desire” was another word for “the power of the negative,”3 a power in which the complex forms of symbolic activity that distinguish the human organism’s relationship to its milieu were deemed to have their origin. It was this understanding of desire as a uniquely human vocation for projective negation of the givens associated with the life of the species that oriented the various neo- and post-structuralist discussions of the term in the 1970s and 1980s (in, for instance, the work of Roland Barthes, René Girard, and Julia Kristeva), however much these discussions may have sought to distance themselves from their humanist origins.

From post-structuralism’s neo-vitalist offspring, operating under the authority of Gilles Deleuze (himself

channeling the nature philosophies of Spinoza and Schelling), came an alternative vision of desire, one that began to reshape discussions of architecture in the early 1990s. For Deleuze and his architectural avatars, desire is a positive and productive force, a process of cosmic autopoiesis at work in all species and at all scales of natural existence. Hays’s appropriation of Lacan’s neo-Freudian account of the relationship between architecture and desire therefore carries implications not only for the immediate object of his attention, the very recent architectural past, but also for our own, Deleuzian or post-Deleuzian present. His partisan narration of that past and the “untimely”—in the best Nietszchean sense—return of a desiring subject that it heralds needs to be read as an implicit judgment on the contemporary architectural ethos.

Not that Hays ever spells those implications out. Indeed, his book could be said to raise as many questions as it answers. Why desire today? More pointedly, why a psychoanalytic conception of desire as opposed to, say, a philosophical, social-scientific, or neuroscientific one? And if the conception is to be psychoanalytic, why should the model of psychoanalysis be Lacanian? What special explanatory power does this model evince when applied to architecture, but more especially to the emergence of an architectural neo-avant-garde in the brief span between 1963 and 1983? (This last question gains force when we consider how marginal Lacan’s influence was on the architecture of this period when compared to that of any number of contemporaries and near contemporaries—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio). Finally, and most importantly, what new understanding of our own relationship to the recent architectural past might the application of a Lacanian lens bring into view?

No more than Hays will I offer a definitive answer to any of these questions, though they hover in the background of everything that follows. My more modest

pArt 1:“MAn is A FAtAL DiseAse

oF the AniMAL”¹

Harvard Design Magazine 35 3



ambit will be first to trace the defining lineaments of Hays’s argument in Architecture’s Desire, teasing out its neo-Lacanian commitments and the particular conception of the intellectual and cultural legacies of modernity that those commitments entail, so as then to at once supplement and complicate that argument with an examination of Lacan’s own, somewhat more sparing and elliptical remarks concerning the relationship between desire and architecture in his seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis.4

Architecture’s DesireIf in the human sciences subject and object necessarily become identified, then the idea of a science without object is not a playful paradox, but perhaps the most serious task that remains entrusted

to thought in our time. What is now more and more frequently concealed by the endless sharpening of knives on behalf of a methodology with nothing left to cut—namely, the realization that the object to have been grasped has finally evaded knowledge—is instead reasserted by criticism as its own specific character. Secular enlightenment, the most profound project of criticism, does not possess its object. Like all authentic quests, the quest of criticism consists not in discovering its object but in assuring the conditions of its inaccessibility.5 —Giorgio Agamben

Hays begins Architecture’s Desire by placing front and center his view that architecture’s “primary task is the construction of concepts and subject positions rather than the making of things.”6 As this remark makes clear, for Hays the architectural object is primarily performative or instrumental, albeit in a sense distinct from, indeed

Aldo Rossi, Porta del Levante, drawing, ink on paper, Bari, Italy, 1993. Private Collection© Eredi Aldo Rossi/Courtesy, Fondazione Aldo Rossi


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antithetical to, the sense that the terms “performative” and “instrumental” have acquired in recent architectural discussions. For Hays, architecture is a sort of stage prop enlisted in the enactment of our collective destiny. Not surprisingly, then, it is primarily the psychoanalytic interest in the role of the object in orienting and symbolically mediating individual and collective desire that recommends this disciplinary approach to architecture. But what specifically recommends the Lacanian model of psychoanalysis?

According to Hays, Lacanian psychoanalysis evinces a special explanatory power when applied to the question that exercised architecture’s “late avant-garde” (Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, John Hedjuk, Bernard Tschumi), a question he describes as bearing not, in the first instance, on architecture’s desire, but rather on its origin, albeit an origin as yet unconstituted, still to come: “Where does architecture come from, and what authorizes its existence as architecture—beyond the particular constitutions already in place? This is the query of the late avant-garde. To which in response they offer not architecture itself but evidence that it exists, as Adorno might say. But the pattern of response is Lacanian.”7

If the late or neo-avant-garde response to its own question concerning architecture’s as yet unaccomplished origin is Lacanian, this apparently has something to do with the difference between “need” and “demand,” a difference that arises, or so the Lacanian story goes, with need’s reorganization “in a medium of the Symbolic.” Elaborating on this idea in the sentence that immediately follows the one just quoted, Hays remarks:

An empirical need reorganized in a medium of the Symbolic is what Lacan distinguishes as a demand, which directs its signifiers to an Other… [one] that is experienced as intervening in (granting, denying, limiting) the satisfaction of…[an empirical] need. When need is reorganized as demand, the immediate, actual object of need is sublated…only to reappear in mediated form—as the avatar of a dimension transcendent to the immediate object (the dimension of the Mother’s love, in the original instance; a horizon at the limit of architecture in the present instance, architecture’s essential but absent structure) and the process-object through which that dimension finds expression.8

For readers schooled in Rayner Banham and Colin Rowe, not Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, this answer to the “why Lacan?” question is liable to seem

somewhat esoteric. Sure, the origin of architecture is very often understood to involve the translation of human need into a symbolic medium, but what is this thing that Hays, apparently following Lacan, calls “demand?” How did it come upon “its signifiers?” Why and how does it “direct” them to “an Other?” Finally, why, in “direct[ing] its signifiers” to that “Other,” should this “demand” be thought of as “denying” or “limiting” the “satisfaction” of a “need?”

To address these questions, it is necessary to say a little, which is more than Hays does, about Lacan’s account of the genesis of desire in the transition from need to demand and the interlacings it affects among the three registers—Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic¬—that make up the psychoanalyst’s topology of the unconscious. Only then will we be in a position to understand the relevance of Lacan’s theory of the subject for Hays’s consideration of architecture as a “socially symbolic production whose primary task is the construction of concepts and subject positions.”9 Before dealing with Lacan directly, however, another aspect of Hays’s argument concerning the relevance of the psychoanalyst’s theories for architecture deserves mention. Alongside or at the terminus of the Lacanian series need-demand-desire appears a fourth term, jouissance, and that term will have a special role to play in Hays’s retooling of Lacan for architectural ends. Our treatment of Lacan will also therefore need to account for the relationship between desire and this jouissance. This will bring us into contact with a network of terms and phrases that constellate around Lacan’s discussion of jouissance, among them sublimation, drive, and creatio ex nihilo. It is in reference to the first and second of these concepts that architecture comes into the Lacanian picture. With that in mind, let us turn to Lacan.

riMMinG the VoiD, petriFyinG pAin: LAcAn AVec pALLADio

The structuring of the animal world is dominated by a certain number of fundamental images which give the world its lines of force majeure. It all happens so differently in man’s world, whose structuration is seemingly neutralized, exceptionally loose in relation to his ends. —Jacques Lacan

We have seen that Hays situates the origin of architecture in the very place that Lacan situates the




genesis of desire, that is, in the transition from need to demand. It is now incumbent on us to describe in greater detail the vector that on Lacan’s account leads from need, via demand, to desire, and further to consider the paradoxical place that drive occupies with respect to it. Our consideration of the Lacanian concepts of desire and drive will set the stage for an examination of the constellation of terms that provide the conceptual backdrop to first Lacan’s, then Hays’s discussions of architecture: sublimation, das Ding, creatio ex nihilo, and jouissance.

From his “only master,” Alexandre Kojève, Lacan had taken the Hegelian message that human desire transcends the realm of need, the exigencies of animal

survival, to the extent that it is first and last desire of the desire of the Other. Unlike Hegel, however, Lacan attributes this peculiarity of human desire not to some mythical agon in which the difference between lord and bondsman would have been decided (this being Hegel’s version of things in his Phenomenology of Spirit) but to a biological circumstance. That circumstance concerns the extreme and protracted dependency of the human infant on its mother, an extremity and protraction Lacan attributes to the relative prematurity of human natality.10

Whereas the infants of other species are fully individuated and functionally adapted to their environments at or soon after birth, human infants are born helpless and remain that way for a long time. From this dependency on the maternal other, and soon enough on a host of other others, arise the intense and complex forms of identification that link the human infans to its fellows, and thus to the elaborate techniques of imaginary and symbolic interaction that such fellowship implies.

What Lacan refers to as the transition from need to demand involves nothing less than the first moment in this process by which the human organism comes to search for itself in the image of the other, or better, in the other as image. This first step occurs at the moment when the infant recognizes the maternal other. On the other side of this recognition, in which the object of need (the breast) and the agent responsible for its appearance and disappearance (the Mother) are differentiated, the significance of the object is utterly transformed. Whatever the infant may once have needed, what he or she now “demands” of the breast is not milk, but a mother’s love. The biological need for nourishment now becomes the instinctual scaffolding on which an emotional world rests or leans, a world that finds its earliest expression in the infant’s demand for the breast as token or signifier of the mother’s love. But if that is what Lacan means by demand, what does he mean by desire? It is important that we answer that question if we are to understand the provocation implicit in Hays’s appeal to a desire that would be proper to architecture, or, at least, to the forms of subjectivity and disciplinary agency we associate with that term.

According to Lacan, desire is the leftover that remains not merely unsatisfied but also unarticulated on the other side of demand. This leftover remains unarticulated not because of any empirical contingency or failure but by virtue of a sort of structural a priori. The lesson here is that satisfaction is paradoxically unsatisfying, since what it delivers is always what the human subject either needed or demanded (i.e., the object), never what it truly

This version of Lacan’s graph of desire, of which there exist many variations, consists of three major vectors. The first vector leads from the barred or split subject [S] to the specular image [i(o)], at which point it bifurcates, giving rise to two new tributary vectors. The first of these leads to the ego (m), at which point it too bifurcates, leading, on the one hand, in the direction of the ego ideal, [I(A)] and, on the other, in the direction of the signification of the Other [S(A)]. The second tributary vector emerging from this bifurcation extends from the specular image [i(o)] to the Other [A]. On the other side of the Other [A], it then branches out in three directions. The first of these branches terminates in the signification of the Other [s(A)], while the other two terminate in the two elements of which the unconscious fantasy is comprised [S a], these being the barred subject [S] and the object [a]. A second major vector leads from the Other [A] to the signification of the Other [S(A)]. A third vector running in the opposite direction, traces the emergence of the speaking being [parletre] in the passage from the signifier to the voice. Taken together, these vectors map the imaginary and symbolic operations that link the subject to the Other in such a way that the ultimate object of the subject’s desire is the desire of that Other.

Jacques Lacan, diagram of desire from Seminar 6, Le désir et son interprétation, 1958-59




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desired (i.e., the desire of that Other of which objects are merely the provisional tokens). Hence, the peculiar vocation to which the object corresponds is that of sustaining the subject in its state of dissatisfaction. To this object, to which Lacan applies the technical moniker objet a, falls the task of indicating, through an operation of negative or sublime figuration, the desire of the Other insofar as it is missing from the object. That is why the object of desire, or to employ Lacan’s somewhat eccentric phrasing, the object in desire, is a reification of the loss of the maternal Thing, but, as such, a way of retaining access to that Thing in the only form in which it was ever truly available, viz. as lost.

In his sixth seminar, Desire and its Interpretation, Lacan links the loss associated with “the object in desire” to that part of the self which is in his account “mortgaged” with its induction into the order of language and meaning: “Something becomes an object in desire when it takes the place of what by its very nature remains concealed from the subject: that self-sacrifice, that pound of flesh which is mortgaged [engagé] in his relationship to the signifier.”11 What is ”mortgaged” here is that part of itself that the self imagines itself to have surrendered as a result of its passage under the censoring bar of the paternal signifier, that bit of itself that refuses integration into the symbolic order and which is connected with the fantasy of fusion with the mother. The object of fantasy therefore functions less like a mirror than like a frame or rim within whose magic circle the subject is able to restage the disappearance of its pre-linguistic being under or behind the signifier—its aphanasis, as Freud would say. By means of this psychic sleight of hand, the subject is thus able to retain itself as this very process of disappearance.

So how does drive fit into this scheme that includes desire and its constitutively lost object? If desire is in Lacan’s account fundamentally a lack, a want-to-be, drive is an irreducibly positive force, a certain affect that the body lives and that becomes especially palpable when pleasure reaches that sublime threshold where its intensity is indistinguishable from pain. As such, drive orients the subject to the object/Thing complex after a fashion distinct from, if dialectically correlated to, that of desire. If desire is what causes the subject to stall before its objet a, seeing in it both the promise of and the interdiction against the attainment of its sublime Ding, drive is an iconoclastic force that ceaselessly compels the subject to move beyond the object, to reject or consume it in the pursuit of ever new objects posing ever new limits. Ultimately, therefore, the drive must be thought to

represent the triumph of the path or pursuit that desire implies over any of its chosen aims or goals. Given this relentlessness of the drive, why should Lacan tell us that its paradigmatic form is the death drive? I propose to postpone that question for the moment. It will arise again, and with greater argumentative urgency, at that point in our exposition of Lacan where we attempt to clarify the connection between those aesthetic phenomena he describes as issuing from “the play of pain” and his appropriation of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.

As i hAVe oBserVeD, this episoDe is thouGht to GiVe to the huMAn AniMAL’s coMportMent with its enVironMent its FunDAMentALLy

“AnthropoMorphic, eVen, eGoMorphic chArActer.”

The seminar that follows Desire and Its Interpretation, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, elaborates on the theory of the object that subtends the discussion of fantasy in the previous seminar and, via a somewhat tendentious reading of Freud’s theory of sublimation, links the question of the object in fantasy, which is to say the object in desire, to the question of the work of art. According to Lacan, the work of art represents a particular form of sublimation, distinct from that of science or religion, namely that form which consists in elevating the object to a status of a Thing. On his view, the work of art has hitherto eluded a proper psychoanalytic account, owing to a tendency on the part of both Freud and his followers to link the sublimation at stake in its production to the aims of the ego. It is in the context of this more general discussion of the work of art that Lacan makes his second reference to architecture in his Ethics. The first such reference occurs in a discussion of the significance that the experience of pain has in the articulation of that Thing (das Ding) that serves as the destination—I do not say object—of the subject’s jouissance, a term whose special meaning in Lacan’s teachings will be clarified below. We will encounter this first discussion of architecture at a later juncture in my argument. For now, let us look a little more closely at Lacan’s discussion of sublimation and the role that architecture plays in it.




Although Lacan draws significantly on Freud’s theory of sublimation, he also differs from Freud in several significant ways, and those differences go directly to the former’s theory of the work of art. In Freud, sublimation is linked to the mechanisms of repression and the socialization of the instincts. It is the practice by which the subject civilizes otherwise destructive instinctual impulses and is understood as motivated by the ego-aims for which social recognition represents a form of satisfaction. For Lacan, on the other hand, sublimation is at work in the subject’s development well before the distinction between egoic and erotic aims has become meaningful. Responding to the suggestion that the artistic and poetic vocations have their psychic roots in the ego-aims (Ichzeile), he remarks: “What needs to be justified is (sic) not simply the secondary benefits that individuals might derive from their works, but the originary possibility of something like a poetic function in the form of a structure within a social consensus…. The problem of sublimation is raised long before the moment when the division between the aims of the libido and the aims of the ego are clear, apparent, and accessible to consciousness.”12

Lacan then offers as illustrations of the “work” at stake in the subject’s sublimations both the development of techniques of anamorphic perspective in early modern painting and the literary and social codes that emerge with the poetry of the troubars and their stilnovist and Minnesanger aftermath. It is the discussion of anamorphosis that primarily concerns us, since it is in the context of that discussion that Lacan offers his excursus on architecture as a form of sublimation. However, we will need to touch on several aspects of his discussion of courtly love poetry as well, since that discussion sheds light on his broader understanding of the significance of the psychoanalytic concept of sublimation for any theory of the work of art as the expression of unconscious desire.

Speaking of the first of the aesthetic phenomena he associates with sublimation, anamorphosis, Lacan describes it as representing “the turning point when the artist completely reverses that illusion of space [produced through the application of perspectival technique], when he forces it to enter into the original goal, that is to transform it into a support for the hidden reality—it being understood that the work of art always involves encircling the Thing.”13 Whereas the legitimate constructions codified by Brunelleschi and Alberti were devoted to producing the illusion of a spatial plenum, the anamorphic techniques employed by painters in the late Renaissance and Baroque periods demonstrate,

according to Lacan, that “the illusion of space is different from the creation of emptiness,” it being in the latter that Lacan recognizes art’s most primitive and enduring vocation:

From the moment when perspective is discovered in painting, a form of architecture appears that adopts the perspectivism of painting. Palladio’s art, for instance, makes this obvious. Go and see Palladio’s theater in Vincenze, a little masterpiece of its kind that in any case is instructive and exemplary. Neoclassical architecture submits itself to the laws of perspective, plays with them, and makes them its own. That is, it places them inside of something that was done in painting in order to find once again the emptiness of primitive architecture.

From that point on one is entangled in a knot which seems to flee increasingly from the meaning of this emptiness. And I believe that the Baroque return to the play of forms, to all manner of devices, including anamorphosis, is an effort to restore the true meaning of artistic inquiry; artists use the discovery of the property of lines to make something emerge that is precisely there where one has lost one’s bearings or, strictly speaking, nowhere.14

As we will see, this reference to the emptiness of primitive architecture finds an echo in Lacan’s later description of the Dijon mustard pot as at once first signifier and first tool. In both cases, the first signifier is indistinguishable from a primitive implement whose sole function is that of rimming or circumscribing—and thereby giving discernible lineaments and exact extent to—the void. In the background of both these references we can glimpse not only Heidegger’s description of the jug as first tool but also the traditional image of the creator as a ceramicist who models his clay around a central hollow, an image to be found, among many other places, in the account of creation in The Book of Genesis.15

From this brief discussion of anamorphosis and its significance for the history and theory of artistic production, Lacan turns to his discussion of courtly love as both a literary and cultural phenomenon. According to Lacan, this phenomenon involves a certain “mirror function” but one distinct from that described in his early discussions of the mirror as imaginary support for the ego’s narcissistic projections. As Lacan puts it: “The mirror function may on occasion imply the mechanisms of narcissism, and especially the diminution of destruction or aggression that we will encounter subsequently. But


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it also fulfils another role, that of limit. It is that which cannot be crossed. And the only organization in which it can be thought to participate is that of the inaccessibility of the object.”16 This second mirror function, which Lacan likens to the operation anamorphosis performs on the illusionist space of single point perspective, is that of enforcing a limit beyond which the subject’s egoic projections cannot penetrate, so that they are reflected back to it in ways that threaten to dissolve the apparently sturdy lineaments of its reality. But how do the rituals associated with courtly love put us in touch with this limit?

Lacan’s general point concerning courtly love is succinctly conveyed in literary historian Maurice Valency’s observation that “The concept of true love was not framed to include success.”17 We have observed that for Lacan something about the Thing that orients the relationship between desire, drive, and jouissance demands that its attainment be eternally frustrated or deferred. The interest of the culture of courtly love then consists not only in the tenacity with which it holds to this demand but also in the techniques it employs for transforming such frustration into a sort of second order pleasure.

In the chapter of the seventh seminar “Courtly Love as Anamorphosis,” Lacan observes that the employment of such techniques represents a point of affinity between the cultural and literary codes associated with courtly love and those practices of erotic delay that Freud discusses under the heading of forepleasure (Vorlust):

“The techniques involved in courtly love…are techniques of holding back, of suspension, of amor interruptus…. It is only insofar as the pleasure of desiring, or, more precisely, the experience of experiencing unpleasure, is sustained that we may speak of the sexual valorization of the preliminary stages of the act of love.”18

These remarks are indicative of a more general homology that Lacan, pace Freud, observes between sexuality and sublimation. Whereas for Freud, sublimation is typically associated with a practice that reworks the sexual instincts in such a way as to place them in the service of the ego-aims through the production of social goods, for Lacan, both sexual activity (most especially in its paradigmatic form, forepleasure) and the activities associated with sublimation divert our animal instincts in a fundamentally novel direction by offering the subject a form of satisfaction that is dissociated from its ultimate aim and which has no necessary connection to the servicing of social goods.

Moreover, for Lacan, this diversion in which both sexuality and sublimation participate sheds light on the drive (Trieb) as we have described it above, i.e. that part of desire that is linked not to the object, but to the Thing for which the object serves as the imaginary cipher.19 I will return below to the question of the drive so as to clarify its relationship to two terms with which it is intimately associated, creatio ex nihilo and jouissance. First, however, it is important to say a few words about that Thing that emerges from the gap between drive and desire, not least because Lacan’s exposition of this Thing provides the occasion for his first reference to architecture.

In the second of the two sections of Lacan’s seventh seminar devoted to “das Ding,” Lacan takes up the discussion of neuronal facilitation (Bahnung) that Freud offers in his Project for a Scientific Psychoanalysis (1895), a discussion which he links to the pleasure principle.20 Of particular interest to Lacan is Freud’s description of the bifurcation of the neuronal pathways in the process of instinctual excitation, a description he integrates into his own account of the concatenation of unconscious representations (Vorstellungen) that constellate around an absent object, with the forms of psychic repetition that the mnemic operations involved in the constitution of these representations implies. Das Ding is the name that Lacan gives to this absent object:

Das Ding has, in effect, to be identified with the Wieder zu finden, the impulse to find again that for Freud establishes the orientation of the human subject to the object. … Moreover, since it is a matter of finding it again, we might just as well characterize this object as a lost object. But although it is essentially a question of finding it again, the object indeed has never been lost. In this orientation to the object, the regulation of the thread, the Vorstellungen relate to each other in accordance with the laws of a memory organization, a memory complex, a Bahnung (that is to say a facilitator, but also, I would say, a concatenation) whose neuronic apparatus perhaps allows us to glimpse those operations in a material form and whose functioning is governed by the law of the pleasure principle.

Lacan thus follows Freud in describing the pleasure principle as the mechanism that “governs the search for the object” in such a way as to insure its loss.




The pleasure principle governs the search for the object and imposes the detours which maintain the distance in relation to its end.… The transference of the quantity from Vorstellung to Vorstellung always maintains the search at a certain distance from that which it gravitates around. The object to be found confers on the search its invisible law; but it is not that, on the other hand, which controls its movements. The element that fixes these movements, that models the return—and this return is itself maintained at a distance—is the pleasure principle….This law [of the pleasure principle] fixes the level of a certain quantity of excitation which cannot be exceeded without going beyond the limit of the Lust/Unlust polarity—pleasure and unpleasure are the only two forms through which the same and single mode of regulation we call the pleasure principle expresses itself.

The admission of quantity is regulated by the width of the channels that do the conducting, by the individual diameters that a given organism can support…. What happens once that limit is exceeded? The psychic impulse is not as such capable of advancing any further toward what is supposed to be its goal. Instead it is scattered and diffused within the psychic organism; the quantity is transformed into complexity. In a kind of expansion of the lighted zone of the neuronic organism, here and there in the distance, it lights up according to the laws of associative facilitation, or constellations of Vorstellungen which regulate the association, unconscious Gedanken, according to the pleasure principle.21

Lacan then goes on to observe that it is the organism’s capacity to flee that typically serves as the means for this regulation of the quantity of excitation in accordance with the pleasure principle, so that what lies before or beyond the pleasure principle—pain, anxiety, terror—would be ineluctably associated with the suspension or interruption of the organism’s motile capacities: “I would have you note that it is avoidance, flight, movement, which in the beginning, even before the system starts to function, normally intervenes in order to regulate the invasion of quantity in accordance with the pleasure principle. And it is to the motor system that the function of regulating the bearable or homeostatic level of tension for the organism is handed over in the end… Freud tells us, in effect, that in the majority of cases pain derives from the fact that the

motor reaction, the flight reaction, is impossible. And the reason for this is that the stimulation comes from within…We should perhaps conceive of pain as a field which, in the realm of existence, opens precisely onto the limit where a living being has no possibility of escape.”22

We shall see in a moment what all this has to do with Lacan’s conception of architecture. First, however, we need to situate these remarks concerning pain and the impossibility of flight within the already well developed metapsychology of movement that can be found in Freud and the first generation of his followers. That discussion includes, along with Freud’s reflections on the topic in “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895), “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” (1926), and elsewhere, the discussions of onanism to be found in Wilhelm Reich and J. Sadger, and the discussions of bodily tics and unconscious gestures to be found in Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, Karl Landauer, and Melanie Klein. Landauer’s development of Freud’s treatment of these questions has a special potential to illuminate Lacan’s considerations of the relationship of movement and its suspension to the pleasure/pain polarity.

From very early on Freud linked unconscious satisfaction to a discharge that is itself a function of motility. In his “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,” he had posited a close relationship between movement and anxiety, with the term anxiety serving to designate at once “…a specific character of unpleasure,” “acts of discharge,” and “perceptions of those acts.”23 He went on to identify the source of this connection in the traumatic deluge of sensory stimulation that accompanies the event of human birth. This may appear to give anxiety a physiological basis, but in an earlier text, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Freud had already insisted that, while anxiety’s origin may be physiological, its specificity must be thought to affect a “defunctionalization” of that foundation, a defunctionalization that he imagined to be the source of what is specific to both the emotional life and the experience of embodiment that is peculiar to the human animal.

In “Motor Restlessness in the Child” (Die Kindliche Bewegungruhe), an article written the same year as “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety,” Landhauer follows Freud in the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” in asserting that anxiety, which he too relates to the “motor storm” of birth, liberates movement from bio-physiognomic function. According to Landauer, the uncoordinated movements of the newborn represent an autoerotic regression in which bio-physiognomic motivations (i.e. motivations relating to the organism’s


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adaptation to its environment, as in the motive to flee from a predator) are preempted by the motive to at once expunge and express feelings of displeasure and anxiety. Situated at the threshold linking the somatic to the symbolic, these movements express the virtual lineaments of a space of the unconscious, a space populated by gestural choreographies rather than by objects.

If these movements serve to express pain, they also serve to actualize a satisfaction or jouissance that brings pleasure to its pinnacle (lustvolle Entausserung). In the infant’s initial movements pleasure and suffering are therefore scarcely distinguishable. Fragmented, uncoordinated, a veritable heap of part objects and drives, the body comporting to this lustvolle Entausserung is a clear precursor of that body in bits and pieces (corps de morcelé) that Lacan, in a paper first delivered at Marienbad in 1936, identified as belonging to the infant prior to the mirror stage.24

Though uncoordinated, the movements of this body evince a rhythmic quality, and that rhythm offers a relatively stable configuration to the imaginary space in which this traversal of the pleasure/pain polarity is first accomplished. Here movement serves as the means for transforming an originally catastrophic jouissance (that excessive excitation to which Landauer refers with the phrase lustvolle Entäusserung) into an iterable modality of pleasure. According to Landauer, it is only gradually, through a kind of process of trial and error, that the newborn’s primitive gesticulations are transformed into an iterable repertoire of gestures that may be performed in accordance with the competing demands of the pleasure and reality principles.25

Lacan’s special contribution to this line of thought consists in a radicalization of Landauer’s “defunctionlization” thesis in which the immanence of imaginary and symbolic orders in the structuration of instinctual expression is especially stressed, and in which the effects of such structuration are understood to have an intimate link to what Freud attempted to identify under the rubric of a beyond of the pleasure principle. In addition, whereas both Freud and Landauer resort to the primacy of an ego that would predate the alienated image it would subsequently assume (such is the implication of the thesis of ‘primary narcissism’), Lacan, drawing on Freud’s own uncharacteristic observation that “a unity comparable to the ego does not exist in the individual from the start,” insists upon the ego’s absence in the first months of the infant’s life. In its place we find the body in bits and pieces (corps de morcelé), bereft of any coherent and durable sense of identity. The passage from this state

of fragmentation and flux to the ego is affected, in Lacan’s account, by the “mirror stage.”

In his argument concerning the mirror stage and the role that it plays in coordinating the incoherent movements of the newborn, Lacan drew significantly on the work of Henri Wallon, who was himself drawing on previous work of Charles Darwin, Charlötte Buhler, and others.26 According to Wallon, the human is condemned first and always to apprehend its “proprioceptive ego” through the mediation of an “exteroceptive image.” Developing these remarks, which he links up with themes and preoccupations borrowed from both Hegel and Freud, Lacan argues that the ego, which he differentiates from the subject, is an image that the child acquires only belatedly, that is to say, somewhere between six and eighteen months after the natal event. This acquisition is realized through anticipatory identification with that unified, because bipedal and motor coordinated, gestalt that the adult counterpart begins to present to the infant at this time, and with which the infant ‘identifies’ in the strict analytic sense of that term:

It suffices to understand the mirror stage in this context as an identification, in the full sense analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image… The jubilant assumption of his specular image by this kind of being…the little man—still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence— at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in its primordial form… The important point is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction…that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality.

For the total form of his body…is given him only in a gestalt, that is, in an exteriority in which, to be sure, this form is more constitutive than constituted, but in which, above all, it appears to him as the contour of his stature that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it, in opposition to the turbulent movements with which the subject feels he animates himself…This gestalt is replete with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue onto which man projects himself, the phantoms that dominate him, and the automaton with which the world of his own making tends to achieve fruition in an ambiguous relation.27




What especially distinguishes Lacan’s account of the motor unconscious from Landauer’s is the stress he places on this event in which the “I” unites itself with an external image, paradigmatically a statue. As Lacan put it in an article written almost twenty years after the “Mirror Stage” paper (1953): “The stability of the standing posture, the impressions of statues set the style for the identification in which the ego finds its starting point.”28 Here it is not enough, as in Landauer, that the subject should establish a gestural repertoire through which its unbearable jouissance can be transformed into a series of pleasures constellated around so many primary love objects. Here the gradual acquisition of motor coordination is punctuated by a fundamental event, a kind of gestalt-switch whose influence on the destiny of the human animal’s motile potentials and attendant capacities for self incorporation and expression is so very profound as to threaten the gradualist model altogether. That event concerns the subject’s projection of an as yet unachieved ideal of self-integration onto an external object.

AccorDinG to LAcAn, Desire is the LeFtoVer thAt reMAins

not MereLy unsAtisFieD But ALso unArticuLAteD on the other siDe

oF DeMAnD. The punctuality of this event is however complicated

by a “temporal dialectic” in which the prematurity of human natality and the belatedness of the genesis of the human ego conspire to ensure that there is never any present in which the projecting self would correspond with the projected self or ego, so that if the mirror phase represents a kind of prosthetic intervention designed to correct the original maladaptation of the human animal to its environment (a maladaptation that expresses itself, for Lacan as for Landauer, as motor activity unhinged from bio-physiognomic function), it is also true that in its very performance of this function the mirror produces a state of alienation or self-estrangement that in Lacan’s view represents an insuperable feature of human existence.

If, for Lacan, the alienation arising from the mirror stage represents an anthropological given, universally observable across the entire spectrum of human historical

circumstances, it is nevertheless the case that this given is thought to find an especially acute expression under conditions of modernity, a modernity whose privileged exponents he deemed to be science and technology. According to Lacan, modern techno-science inflects the ontological and epistemological burdens of the human condition in a fundamentally paranoid, persecutory direction. Welded to the very objects he produces in the name of a second nature that would be fully expressive of his freedom, modern man is par excellence the statue man or fleshy automaton that the infant first projects in the mirror phase, As Mikkel-Borch-Jacobsen puts it in his neo-Heideggerian gloss on Lacan’s theory of the imaginary:

“The ‘paranoid knowledge’ that Lacan describes is only another name for the Moderns’ representational knowledge, where everything is an object (of per-ception, inspection, appropriation) for a subject.” 29

We shall encounter this alienation or self-division again, and will consider its political implications, in the discussions of Lefort and Rancière that I introduce in the conclusion to the second part of this work.

In a paper given twelve years after the paper on the Mirror Stage, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan stresses the cruelty and malice that is built into the identificatory mechanisms whose genesis he traces to this phase. He then goes on to link these mechanisms to a “stagnation” within the flux of experience that he describes as specific to the human animal’s negotiation of its Umwelt. Speaking with specific reference to the theories of Pierre Janet, he says:

Janet, who demonstrated so admirably the signification of feelings of persecution as phenomenological moments in social behavior, did not explore their common character, which is that they are constituted by a stagnation of one of those moments, similar in their strangeness to the faces of actors when a film is suddenly stopped in mid-action.

Now this formal stagnation is akin to the most general structure of human knowledge: that which constitutes the ego and its objects with attributes of permanence, identity, and substantiality, in short, with entities or ‘things’ that are very different from the Gestalten that experience enables us to isolate in the shifting field, stretched in accordance with the lines of animal desire.30


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Elaborating on these ideas in his seminar on he psychoses, Lacan describes the object of this knowledge” as in the first instance the object of the other’s desire, so that “all human knowledge has its source in the dialectic of jealousy.”

What I designated thus in my first communication to the group Evolution psychiatrique, which at the same time was remarkably original, was aimed at the paranoid affinities between all knowledge of objects as such. All human paranoid knowledge stems from the dialectic of jealousy, which is a primordial manifestation of communication. It’s a matter of an observable generic notion, behavioristically observable. What takes place between two children involves this fundamental ‘transivitism’ expressed by the fact that one child that has beaten another can say—The other beat me. It’s not that he is lying—he is the other.

This is the basis of the distinction between the human world and the animal world. Human objects are characterized by their neutrality and indefinite proliferation. They are not dependent on the preparation of any instinctual coaptation of the subject, in the way that there is coaptation, housing, of one chemical valency by another. What makes the human world a world covered with objects derives from the fact that the object of human interest is the object of the other’s desire.31

On Lacan’s account, the aggressivity that marks the imaginary relation to the human counterpart also structures his relationship to the object realm at large, so that a similar sort of zero sum scenario transpires in our relations with inanimate things: If it is, I am not. If I am, it is not. But how could the subject’s relations with the object be otherwise when, as we have seen Lacan assert, the first object and, as such, the archetype for every object to follow, is an ego modeled on the image of the human counterpart? In the seminar delivered the year before the one in which the remarks quoted above were made, Lacan stresses the fact that this identificatory dimension of the subject-object nexus is integral to what distinguishes the human world (Welt) from every form of bio-species milieu (Umwelt):

What did I try to get across with the mirror stage? That whatever in man is loosened up, fragmented, anarchic, establishes its relation to his perceptions on a plane with a completely original tension. The

image of his body is the principle of every unity he perceives in objects. Now, he only perceives the unity of this specific image from the outside, and in an anticipated manner. Because of this double relation which he has with himself, all the objects of his world are always structured around the wandering shadow of his own ego. They will have a fundamentally anthropomorphic character, even egomorphic we could say. Man’s ideal unity, which is never attained as such and which escapes him at every moment, is evoked at every moment in this perception. The object for him is never the final goal…it thus appears in the guise of an object from which man is irremediably separated, and which shows him the very figure of his dehiscence within the world…It is in the nature of desire to be radically torn. If the object perceived from without has its own identity, the latter places the man who sees it in a state of tension, because he perceives himself as desire, and as unsatisfied desire. Inversely, when he grasps his unity…it is the world which for him becomes decomposed, loses its meaning, and takes on an alienated and discordant aspect. It is this imaginary oscillation which gives to all human perception the dramatic subjacency experienced by a subject, insofar as his interest is aroused.32

It is with these remarks in mind that I return to the original point of departure for this digression on Lacan’s place within the history of a metapsychology of movement, and that is his equation of pain and the impossibility of flight. Lacan introduces the discussion of this topic with a psychoanalytic interpretation of the myth of Daphne and Apollo, an interpretation in which Daphne’s petrification is thought to reveal an essential dimension of the relationship between the human experience of pain, which Lacan equates with a suspension of the human animal’s motor powers, and the aesthetic impulse. It is in the context of that interpretation that Lacan makes his argument that architecture is the medium in which this “petrification of pain” finds its most vivid and consequential expression:

Isn’t something of this suggested to us by the insight of the poets in that myth of Daphne transformed into a tree under pressure of a pain from which she cannot flee? Isn’t it true that the living being who has no possibility of escape suggests in its very form the presence of what one might call petrified pain? Doesn’t what we do in the realm of stone suggest this? To the extent that we don’t let it roll, but erect it, and




make of it something fixed, isn’t there in architecture itself a kind of actualization of pain?

What happened during the period of the Baroque, under the influence of an historical movement we will come back to later, would support this idea. Something was attempted then to make architecture itself aim at pleasure, to give it a form of liberation, which, in effect, made it blaze up so as to constitute a paradox in the history of masonry and building. And that pleasure gave us forms which, in a metaphorical language that in itself takes us a long way, we call “tortured.”33

What are we to make of Lacan’s morbid parody of that venerable conceit in which the human figure, the arboreal figure, and the architectural figure coincide? What is the psychic significance of that “petrification of pain” that this composite figure affects?

Lacan hints at an answer to these questions when he offers, as the justification for this brief digression on architecture, their relevance to a forthcoming discussion of “the man of pleasure and the eighteenth century.” Lacan is patently referring here to the discussion of the “Sadean fantasm” that he takes up in the context of a reading of Sophocles’ Antigone toward the conclusion of his seminar. That discussion both picks up on the connection between pain and the impossibility of escape advanced in the passages examined above and links that discussion to a concept that will concern us presently: creatio ex nihilo. It reads as follows:

The limit involved, the limit that it is necessary to situate if a certain phenomenon is to emerge through reflection, is something I have called the phenomenon of the beautiful, it is something I have begun to define as the limit of the second death [a death Lacan will later equate with “a suffering beyond death that is indefinitely sustained.”] I first brought this to your attention in connection with Sade as something that sought to pursue nature to the very principle of its creative power, which regulates the alteration of corruption and generation. Beyond that order, which is no longer easy for us to think of and assume in the form of knowledge …Sade tells us there is something else, that a form of transgression is possible, and he calls it “crime” …

Sade’s thought goes as far as forging the strangely extravagant notion that through crime man is given the power to liberate nature from her own laws. For its own Laws are chains. What one has to sweep

aside in order to force nature to start again from zero, so to speak, is the reproduction of forms against which nature’s both harmonious and contradictory possibilities are stifled in an impasse of conflicting forces. That is the aim of Sadean crime. It isn’t for nothing that crime is one boundary of our exploration of desire or that it is on the basis of a crime that Freud attempted to reconstruct the genealogy of the law. The frontiers represented by “starting from zero,” ex nihilo, is, as I indicated at the beginning of my comments this year, the place where a strictly atheist thought necessarily situates itself. A strictly atheist thought adopts no other perspective than that of “creationism.”

In the typical Sadean scenario, suffering doesn’t lead the victim to the point where he is dismembered and destroyed. It seems rather that the object of all torture is to retain the capacity of the living being as an indestructible support. Analysis shows clearly that the subject separates out a double of himself who is made inaccessible to destruction, so as to make it support what, borrowing a term from the realm of aesthetics, one cannot help calling the play of pain. For the space in question is the same as that in which aesthetic phenomena disport themselves, a space of freedom. And the conjunction between the play of pain and the phenomena of beauty is to be found there, though it is never emphasized.34

Linking the conceptual constellation that emerges from this passage (the play of pain, the realm of aesthetics, and the space of freedom) to his earlier remarks concerning those “tortured” forms that epitomize the link between pain and the impossibility of flight, we might say that for Lacan the aesthetic phenomenon specific to architecture concerns its capacity to give figure to a suffering inaccessible to destruction, undiminished on the other side of the end that death would make. Apollo’s Daphne, the architecture of Borromini and Bernini, and the Sadean victim would on this account be united by their capacity to serve as the material support for the figuration of this suffering. The provision of this support provides the subject who negatively identifies with it a certain distance on his or her own suffering, one thanks to which the subject is then able to play with its anxiety and pain, thereby transforming their claustrophobic immanence into “a space of freedom.” For Lacan, who here sounds a bit like Schiller, it is in this space in which the subject’s relationship to its own suffering assumes a ludic dimension that “the phenomena of the beautiful”


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first appear. But what relationship is Lacan asking us to imagine as obtaining between these phenomena and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo? In order to address that question, we need now to take up the question that we at once posed and tabled at the conclusion of our discussion of Lacan’s theory of the drive: why is the death drive the paradigmatic form of the drive? Only then will we be in a position to appreciate the link between his description of “the phenomena of the beautiful” and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.

Lacan’s death drive represents something other than a self-destructive impulse, however much the Lacanian exemplars of this drive, Antigone and Hamlet, may seem to embrace the Sophoclean judgment that it were better not to have been born. Rather the death drive ultimately involves for Lacan desire’s “subtraction” from the unity of the symbolic order, the carving out of a certain void within that unity. This subtraction is understood by Lacan to be strictly correlative to the first introduction of the signifier into the order of the Real and as such a condition of the very order it throws in question.

However, if, on Lacan’s account, the death drive and its operation of subtraction must be thought to point beyond the symbolic order, its relationship to the biological order is not less one of alterity, which is why Lacan insists on talking about a death drive as opposed to a death instinct. The death drive is for him the expression of a certain tension between the laws of organic maturation and those laws according to which the human subject acquires a historical destiny, a tension that has its genesis in the introduction of what Lacan describes as a primordial signifier distinguished by its power to interrupt or suspend the cycles that determine the time of organic development: “It is because the movement of desire is in the process of crossing the line of a kind of unveiling that the advent of the Freudian notion of the death drive is meaningful for us. The question is raised at the level of the relation of the human being to the signifier as such, to the extent that at the level of the signifier every cycle of being may be called into question, including life in its movement of loss and return.”35 Lacan elaborates on this link between the primordial signifier and the institution of a distinction between natural and properly historical modes of temporalization with reference to a “mortality” whose extra-animalic implications suggest not only Heidegger’s description of Dasein as a being-towards-death (Sein-zu-Tode) but also his insistence that the world (Welt) of human Dasein is radically distinct from the biosemiotic milieu (Umwelt) of the non-human animal. It is this sense of human history as having the power to break with

the solitus cursus naturae, to initiate a radically new beginning, which motivates Lacan’s use of the theological concept of creatio ex nihilo.

We have seen Lacan declare, in the discussion of the Sadean fantasm in which he alludes to the connection between the beautiful and creatio ex nihilo, that “a strictly atheist thought adopts no other perspective than that of ‘creationism’.” What could he have meant by this? Reminding his reader that non-specialist uses of the term sublimation invariably imply the concept of creation, Lacan describes his understanding of the term somewhat provocatively as a psychoanalytic transcription of theological doctrine. Then, as if to highlight the scandal, he instructs his reader to “beware that register of thought known as evolutionism.” The nihil that is at stake in creatio ex nihilo is, according to Lacan, none other than the void that the first signifier introduces into the Real. Like Heidegger’s jug as primordial tool, this first signifier is described as being responsible for introducing distinctions between near and distant, inside and outside, empty and full, into a primordial chaos that hitherto knew nothing of them.36 In the section of the seventh seminar entitled “On creation ex nihilo,” Lacan, having offered the vase and the Dijon mustard pot as Gallic variations on Heidegger’s jug, goes on to explicitly link that rimming of the void that their fabrication entails to the instauration of a primordial signifier:

Now if you consider the vase [or the mustard pot] from the point of view that I have proposed, as an object made to represent the emptiness at the center of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents itself as a nihil, as nothing. And that is why the potter, just like you to whom I am now speaking, creates the vase with his hand around this emptiness, creates it, like the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole.

Everyone makes jokes about macaroni, because it is a hole with something around it, or about canons [sic]. The fact that we laugh does not change the situation, however; the fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a hole or a gap in the real is identical .37

For Lacan, this notion of a first signifier full of emptiness is “strictly coextensive” with the notion of the Thing at which sublimation aims, and every act of sublimation represents nothing less than an attempt to reenact that double advent of the void and its reification that this first signifier introduces. It is precisely in this sense that we




should read Lacan’s description of architecture as the circumscription of the void. But we must not forget that in his first reference to architecture Lacan also associates it with the fantasm of a body that would suffer for eternity, it being understood that the essence of such suffering consists in the impossibility of flight. What relationship is Lacan asking us to imagine as obtaining between eternal suffering and that rimming of the void that the first signifier introduces into the Real?

As is so frequently the case in his seminars, Lacan abstains from making the connection—or almost abstains—his sole clue being the remark that he makes in the context of drawing an analogy between the object that is at stake in the Sadean fantasm and the one that is at stake in Immanuel Kant’s concept of the beautiful: “Suffering is conceived as a stasis which affirms that that which is cannot return to the void from which it emerged.”38 To complete the thought that is hinted at here, we merely need to add: if suffering does not return to the void, it is because it is condemned to remain at the void’s limit or edge, marking there the irremissible dimension of life as lived in language. That this dimension of the ex nihilo is something peculiar to human life, to the singular and therefore properly historical event that the beginning of such a life represents, is a point Lacan makes with specific reference to Antigone’s response to Creon’s refusal of burial rites to her brother:

Because he (Antigone’s brother Polynices) is abandoned to the dogs and the birds and will end his appearance on earth in impurity, with his scattered limbs an offence to heaven and earth, it can be seen that Antigone’s position represents the radical limit that affirms the unique value of his being without reference to any content, any good or evil Polynices may have done, or to whatever he may be subjected to.

The unique value involved is essentially that of language. Outside of language it is inconceivable, and the being of him who has lived cannot be detached from all he bears with him in the nature of good and evil, of destiny, of consequences for others, of feelings for himself. That purity, that separation of being from the characteristics of the historical drama he has lived through, is precisely the limit or the ex nihilo to which Antigone is attached. It is no more than the break that the very presence of language inaugurates in the life of man.39

Now let us see how the concept of jouissance (which we have already brushed up against in our discussions of desire, drive, and das Ding) is implicated in this idea of creatio ex nihilo.

Lacan first introduces jouissance in Les formations de l’inconscient, a seminar he delivered in 1957–58.40

There he describes it as a notion that was always implicit in his discussions of desire, a notion that nevertheless needs to be distinguished from it. Thereafter, Lacan’s neo-Hegelian formulations concerning desire (desire is lack of being, desire is its interpretation, desire is the desire of the Other) would be rethought in light of this Johnny-come-lately term. From the very beginning of Lacan’s employment of it, the term jouissance is chosen for its ability to mean both itself, i.e., enjoyment, and its opposite, the absence of enjoyment. As Lacan, echoing his earlier speculations on architecture as the petrification of pain, remarks in “Psychoanalyse et médicine,” (1966): “What I call jouissance—in the sense in which the body experiences itself—is always in the nature of a tension, in the nature of a forcing, of a spending, even of an exploit. Unquestionably, there is jouissance at the level at which pain begins to appear, and we know it is only at this level that a whole dimension of the organism, which would otherwise remain veiled, can be experienced.”41

Notwithstanding the tendency on the part of contemporary commentators like Bruce Fink to translate jouissance with the English term “satisfaction,” thereby rendering it more or less synonymous with Freud’s term Befriedigung, the French word does not equate strictly with either its English or the German counterparts. Not that jouissance and satisfaction are unrelated. For instance, in seminar seven Lacan remarks: “jouissance appears not purely and simply as the satisfaction of a need, but as the satisfaction of a drive.”42 The difficulty comes precisely in the displacement of satisfaction from need to drive that this remark invokes. If this displacement represents a difficulty, it is because, as we have already observed, drive expresses nothing so much as the force of a relentless dissatisfaction, the subject’s inability to be satisfied by any one of the open series of Vordstellungen that the unconscious keeps in its arsenal of phantasms. If the drive is the insatiable itself, then jouissance, as “satisfaction of the drive,” can only imply the paradoxical satisfaction that might be derived from enduring dissatisfaction not to the end but to the very end. Death in life, pleasure in pain, ecstasy at the extreme limit of frustration: these formulas, familiar from Lacan’s discussion of courtly poetry as well as from his equation


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of pain and the impossibility of egress, acquire new meaning when read against this description of jouissance as “satisfaction of the drive.”43

Having traversed the terminological series that leads from need, via demand, to desire and drive so as then to explore the link between these last two terms and the semantic constellation that includes sublimation, das Ding creatio ex nihilo, and jouissance (and having, over the course of working through these concepts, worked through Lacan’s two references to architecture in his seventh seminar), let us now consolidate our findings.

We have seen how, owing to an event of original maladaptation, viz. premature natality, the human subject acquires capacities for imaginary and symbolic mediation of experience that radically distinguish the range of affects of which it is capable from the instinctual responses associated with other species. Furthermore, we have seen that the object that is the correlate of this human subject acquires an entirely novel significance on the other side of the passage from need to desire; it assumes the role of standing in for the Thing of an originally lost jouissance. It is from this perspective that we must read Lacan’s claim that the work of art elevates the object to the status of a Thing.

It was in this context that Lacan came to describe architecture as exemplary of the operation that is at stake in this elevation of the object to the status of a Thing, an operation that he describes in two distinct ways in his two discussions of architecture but without ever undertaking to clarify the relationship between these two characterizations. On the one hand, architecture is the petrification of pain, on the other, the act of rimming or circumscribing, and so giving form to, the void. The implication here is that pain, or, at any rate, a suspension of the pleasure/pain polarity that organizes the distribution of instinctual excitation associated with the pleasure principle, represents the affective corollary of the fact that for the human animal the signifier has always already carved out a hole in the real, thereby rendering the Thing of its jouissance inaccessible by virtue of its very nature. The primitive vocation of the work of architecture would then consist in giving figure to this void, this limit at which the supremacy of the pleasure principle is subject to suspense. It is at or on this limit as well that what is called human culture is according to Lacan differentiated from the continuum of organic phenomena. From the Lacanian perspective, animal architecture is therefore an oxymoron.

Lacan’s discussions of architecture in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis thus offer us a negative anthropological

conception of architecture in which the discipline’s primitive vocation consists in instituting, from within the physical space that is extended in three dimensions, and for whose optical apprehension the human animal acquires a special vocation owing to its assumption of a bipedal stance, the institution of a limit, a limen or border, separating the near from the remote, the interior from exterior, the open from the closed. The institution of this limit involves on Lacan’s account the original provision of the spatial framework in which all subsequent sublimations must appear. If Lacan is to be believed, not only architecture but also the tool and the signifier have their origin in this instaurational gesture.

A final point: Lacan’s account of architecture, and more broadly of art, is situated entirely within the frame, avowedly Cartesian, of the subject-object nexus. This remains true notwithstanding Lacan’s novel understanding of the object as an object in rather than of desire. As I will argue in “Perhaps Architecture Begins with the Animal,” things are otherwise for Deleuze and Guattari. For them the relationship that orients architecture is not the relationship between subject and object but rather the relationship between organism and milieu, and it is from this biocentric perspective that, having already identified architecture as the first of the arts, they are led to speculate that “perhaps art begins with the animal.”44

Architecture’s suBJect:ecLipse AnD return

It would be very easy to prove to you that the machine is much freer than the animal. The animal is a jammed machine. It’s a machine with certain parameters that are no longer capable of variation. And why? Because the external environment determines the animal, and turns it into a fixed type. It is in as much as, compared to the animal, we are machines, that is to say something decomposed, that we possess greater freedom, in the sense in which freedom means the multiplicity of possible choices.45 —Jacques Lacan

What are the implications of Lacan’s thought for contemporary architectural practice? I rather hope there aren’t any. The last thing the discipline needs is practitioners who would undertake to design unconscious experience, to reshape our buildings and our cities in conformity with that “desire” whose morbid kernel Lacan




took such great pains to expose. Such a methodical “derangement of the senses” is better left to the poets, those who are left. However, Lacan’s thought does have implications for how we think about the theory and historiography of architecture, and I would suggest that those implications, if taken seriously, have a potential to force a rethinking of the pressures and motivations that define contemporary practice.

In the current climate, those who hold chairs in prominent architecture departments are as apt to be found “kissing architecture” as thinking critically about its relationship to larger domains of human experience. Unchallenged, this hagiography of the given has grave implications for practice, for in the absence of a theoretical mandate shaped by a recognition of what is specific to the present’s response to the accumulated questions and commitments that define the discipline’s historical legacy, practice is left to drift on successive waves of technological innovation posing as world-historical necessity. That is how we have arrived at a circumstance in which a technical development, the introduction of “parametric” design tools, is elevated to the status of a “style,” indeed, the defining style of our demi-epoch.46 In recent history, both Wes Jones and Antoine Picon have described technological determinism as the signal feature of the discipline in its current state.47 Jones’s diagnosis of the current mood seems to me an especially perspicacious expression of the failure of intellectual nerve and ethical vision that this determinism entails:

Remarkably two forks in the road have opened up for architecture at this millennial moment. One is marked by the difference (as perhaps a culmination of the Modern in the maturity of the Postmodern) between the traditionally authored and the automatic, or the (tragic pursuit of the) fixed and the (lazy preference for the) variable, manifested in the distance interpolated between the author and design, especially by new (digital) technology. The other is the profound divergence today of sense and sensation—between work that appeals traditionally to the intellect and that which appeals only to the senses. In other words, we have seen the emergence of a belief in the possibility of pure affect, pure sensation. …

Nor are the two forks unrelated. In fact, both can be understood as consequences of a shift in the underlying sense of architectural necessity. As an elective enterprise, architecture is constantly in need of self-assurance. The sense of architectural necessity

is a kind of faith, exercised at every step of the design process and through each design choice. Traditionally residing in the convictions of the sophisticated subject, the intuition or judgment of what is right in architecture is being pushed toward something objective, external, quantifiable. …

Two practice models exemplify the range and character of responses to this event and its expression in authorlessness and sensualism. On the one hand, what has come to be known as “Dutch” architecture finds its putative architectural necessity in program-based computation, favoring the authorless pragmatism of statistics and quantifiable cultural research. On the other hand, the more ubiquitous “digital” design finds its own certainty in a parametric computation of infinite, non-critical formal variability, with its simultaneous assurance of all possibility and no particularity: necessity not by way of certainty but through infinite accommodation and sensuous delight.48

Refining Jones’s diagnosis somewhat, I would say that “authorlessness” and “sensualism” find their common origin in the eclipse of any sense of a subject and the particular forms of judgment and critical agency that are the conceptual correlatives of such a subject. It is important to stress that the link between technological determinism and this eclipse of the subject is by no means a feature of architecture exclusively. In his extraordinary meditation on our technological present, “What Is an Apparatus?,” the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben has observed that:

What defines the apparatuses that we have to deal with in the current phase of capitalism is that they no longer act as much through the production of a subject, as through the processes of what can be called desubjectification. A desubjectifying moment is certainly implicit in every process of subjectification.…The penitential self is constituted only through its own negation. But what we are now witnessing is that processes of subjectification and processes of desubjectification seem to become reciprocally indifferent, and so they do not give rise to the recomposition of a new subject, except in larval or, as it were, spectral form. In the nontruth of the subject, its own truth is no longer a stake…. Hence the eclipse of politics, which used to presuppose the existence of subjects and real identities (the workers’ movement, the bourgeoisie, etc.), and the triumph


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of the oikonomia, that is to say, of a pure activity of government that aims at nothing other than its own replication.49

I would argue that the “technological determinism” disguised as naturalism that Jones identifies as the signal feature of our age is merely a symptom of this situation in which processes of subjectification and processes of desubjectification have become indifferent to each other.

It is in view of the eclipse of any sense of subjective agency resulting from this situation that Lacan’s thinking acquires its interest in the context of contemporary architectural discussion. His vision of psychoanalysis involved first and foremost a consolidation and philosophical clarification of the Freudian concept of the subject, a consolidation and clarification he achieved by reading Freud through the double lens of phenomenological and existential recastings of the Kantian/Hegelian subjectum, on the one hand, and structuralist theories of signification, on the other. Lacan’s stubborn fealty to the concept of the subject, and his insistence that, given appropriate refinements, Freud’s theory of Oedipalization can still serve as an adequate framework for understanding this subject’s formation, places him at a distance from those who took up his thought in the generation that followed: Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and, most importantly for our purposes, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

It is one of the great merits of Architecture’s Desire that Hays follows Lacan in insisting on the centrality of the subject in the theories and practices of the late avant-garde, and in so doing, affects a refinement and neo-psychoanalytic recasting of the problem of the architectural “subject” that had been the topic of his 1992 book, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject.50 It is another of the merits of that work to have revealed the affinities between Lacan’s theory of the subject (with all by way of imaginary and symbolic mediation of experience that this theory implies) and the sense of architectural agency at play in the work of the late avant-garde (Rossi, Hedjuk, Tschumi, Eisenman). Beyond all doubt, Architecture’s Desire represents a significant, which is not to say fashionable, intervention into the current discussion of the recent past and its implications for the present. Having said that, Hays’s more narrowly historical concerns (the late avant-garde) prevent him from offering any systematic presentation of the negative anthropology that subtends Lacan’s theorization of desire and its significance in his theorization of the forms of sublimation among which architecture is numbered. This has the effect

of allowing Hays to back away from the central theoretical task of our putatively posthuman present, the task of determining to what extent and in what way architecture should be understood as an exclusively anthropological affair. The particular relevance of Lacan’s thought to this undertaking has to do with his unflinching attention to the fault line that his “only Master,” Alexandre Kojève, had earlier identified at the heart of the concept of the human. As Agamben, glossing Kojève, has recently observed, that fault line is situated in the same place where Lacan situates the genesis of the subject—at the point of tension between the animal corresponding to the species concept Homo sapiens and a humanity that can emerge only through the suppression or imperfect negation of that animal: “In Kojève’s reading of Hegel, man is not a biologically defined species, nor is he a substance given once and for all; he is, rather, a field of dialectical tensions always already cut by internal caesurae that every time separate—at least virtually—‘anthropophorous’ animality and the humanity which takes bodily form in it. Man…can be human only to the degree that he transcends and transforms the anthropophorous animal which supports him, and only because, through the action of negation, he is capable of mastering and, eventually, destroying his own animality.”51

I have observed that, in addition to identifying the emergence of the subject at this threshold between the human animal and the human being, it was Lacan’s contribution to this line of thinking to have described in some detail the imaginary and symbolic mechanisms that array themselves along this fault line of the human, mechanisms that he saw as the constitutive psychic operations at play in the creation of architecture, as in all the other sublimations of our inner animal. Following a line of thought that resonates deeply with certain strands of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century empathy theory, Lacan described the central episode in the human being’s “destruction of his own animality” as involving the assumption, through a kind of optical prolepsis, of its own bipedal and motor coordinated ego image. As I have observed, this episode is thought to give to the human animal’s negotiations with its environment its fundamentally “anthropomorphic, even egomorphic” complexion. For Lacan, then, architecture is the world thought in the image of Vitruvian man, the measure and exemplar of all things—or it would be, were it not for Lacan’s sensitivity to another potential that resides in the architectural image, an anamorphic one in which the infrastructural support that imaginary and symbolic mechanisms lend to the ego’s construction




of its “world-picture” begin to tremble and threaten to collapse under the weight of the Real. As we have seen, Lacan’s successive descriptions of architecture as the “petrification of pain” and the “encircling of the void” are intimately related to this understanding of the imaginary object’s anamorphic potencies, and it is by virtue of its capacity to give play to these potencies that architecture is thought by Lacan to enjoy a special proximity to the most primitive psychic motivations informing the work of art.

LAcAn’s Account oF Architecture, AnD More

BroADLy oF Art, is situAteD entireLy within

the FrAMe, AVoweDLy cArtesiAn, oF the

suBJect-oBJect neXus. Lacan’s description of the imaginary and symbolic

mechanisms at stake in the quasi-miraculous eruption of the human out of the “anthropophorous animal” stresses the central importance that object fixation has in the establishment of the human being’s comportment with its milieu. This emphasis rubs contemporary eschewals of any aesthetic of the object briskly against the grain. Environmental aesthetics, sensorial aesthetics, atmospheric aesthetics, ambient aesthetics, and relational aesthetics are so many names for this contemporary allergy to the object. Similarly, Lacan’s stress on the interlacing of perceptual and cognitive faculties that is constitutive of the forms of imaginary life peculiar to the human animal is at odds with the thematizations of sensation and affect that have followed from the reception of Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics of the imperceptible. Intimately linked to the environmental turn in contemporary aesthetics, recent thematizations of sensation and affect set aside consideration of the perceptions and subsequent forms of judgment associated with the subject in favor of a consideration of the more primary strata of individuation associated with sensible experience prior to its formal and categorical organization. The difference between Lacan’s assessment

of these matters, on the one hand, and those of Deleuze and Guattari, on the other, will be among the topics I treat in the sequel to this work.

As I explore in greater detail in the second part of this essay, Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that architecture begins with the animal is part of a larger commitment to a philosophy of cosmic immanence. Now Lacan’s insistence that, thanks to the intervention of the death drive, human desire and its products are radically separated from the cycles of birth and regeneration that define the time of intramundane immanence may appear to appeal to the human subject as a locus of transcendence. However, as Alenka Zupančič reminds us in her recent treatment of Lacan’s relationship to contemporary philosophies of “finitude” and “immanence,” it is less the case for Lacan that man transcends the order of intramundane immanence than that he de-completes it: “The Beyond is included in the world and in the human as the heterogeneous element on account of which a man is never simply and only a man…. Already desire in its radical negativity—but especially the drive, with its always excessive, ‘surplus’ nature—necessarily complicates the story of accepting ones finitude…. What is at stake could be formulated as follows: our finitude is always-already a failed finitude—one could say a finitude with a leak in it.”52

Whatever one ultimately makes of Lacan’s negative anthropology and its aesthetic implications, questions concerning the anthropological determination of architecture’s disciplinary products are not merely constitutive questions for any adequate theory of the discipline, they are also timely, given both our new understanding of the continuities and co-dependencies that link the now fragile future of humanity to the destiny of non-human species and our new understanding of the continuities and co-dependencies that link the future of human consciousness to the cybernetic instruments that increasingly populate our technical milieu. The task of conceiving “an atheism that is not a humanism,” to borrow Stefanos Geroulanos’s very apt description of the project of French thought in the period extending from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century,53 and the further task of determining what role and significance the concept of the human should have in the articulation of this atheism—these were central tasks for Lacan. The locus of this determination was for Lacan the subject, which he links to the isolation of what, within the human animal, is not of it. We may follow Hays in arguing that this subject, when submitted to the disciplinary inflections that are implicit in the title of architect, is none other than


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the addressee of a nomos (law) that haunts contemporary claims to disciplinary heteronomy as much as it did neo-avant-garde claims to disciplinary autonomy. A subject is what receives this nomos in the throes of a heteronomous donation in whose absence there could be no autonomy. The semiotic dispositif that serves as the conduit for this heteronomous donation at the origin of all autonomy is what Lacan called the symbolic. That Lacan’s conception of the symbolic and its anthropological agencies in no way corresponds to a humanism, even a humanism conceived in the manner of Ernst Cassirer’s zoon symbolikon, is apparent, among other places, in a remark that he made in a seminar predating his Ethics seminar by half a decade:

It isn’t a matter of positing a communal soul somewhere, in which all these calculations would take place, it isn’t a question of any psychological entification, it is a question of the symbolic function. The symbolic function has absolutely nothing to

do with a para-animal formation, a totality which would make of the whole of humanity a kind of large animal—for in the end, that’s what the collective unconscious is….Thus, when it comes down to it, we always try to explain the living organism in terms of mechanism. The first question which we analysts must answer, and which can perhaps help us get away from the controversy which exists between vitalism and mechanism, is the following—why are we led to think of life in terms of mechanism? In what way actually are we, as men, parents of the machine?54

Hays’s untimely fealty to the subject that is the posthuman precipitate of this symbolic function is a burning torch tossed into the post-critical tent. To smell the smoke, to feel the heat that emanates from its clarifying flame, would require of our contemporary celebrants of an authorless sensualism some exercise of the very critical faculties they claim to have outgrown.




There is a territory precisely when [sic] milieu components cease to be directional, becoming dimensional instead, when they cease to be functional to become expressive.... Take the example of colour in birds or fish: colour is a membrane state associated with interior hormonal states. But it remains functional and transitory as long as it is tied to a type of action (sexuality, aggressiveness, flight). It becomes expressive, on the other hand, when it acquires a temporal constancy and a spatial range that make it a territorial, or rather territorializing, mark: a signature.55—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

If Lacan shared with his structuralist and neo-structuralist contemporaries an ambition to produce a “negative anthropology” capable of challenging the verities of traditional humanism and the particular forms of subjectivity such humanism promoted, it is nevertheless also true that his thought, and most especially his thinking of the forms of sublimation associated with the work of art, remains deeply informed by his sense of the specificity of the human condition, a specificity that we have seen Lacan associate with three related aspects of that condition: the importance that the image of the maternal other assumes in the infant’s acquisition of its ego image, the role that imaginary and symbolic operations have in shaping the affective disposition of the human individual on the other side of that acquisition, and the sentience of the imminence of its own death that results from this reshaping of the instincts according to the vicissitudes of imaginary and symbolic orders. As we have also seen, Lacan’s account of the vector that leads

from animal need via demand to desire and jouissance follows from this insistence on the specificity of the human and the peculiar forms of historicity to which that specificity gives rise.

Rejecting Lacan’s neo-mechanist reading of Freud’s death drive,56 Deleuze and Guattari elaborate a neo-vitalist ontology of life that draws significantly on the naturalist trajectory in modern philosophy, from Giordano Bruno and Baruch Spinoza to Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Henri Bergson. With this neo-vitalist ontology comes a displacement of the concept of the subject from the human individual onto the cosmos as a whole, a cosmos they conceive according to the model of a “plane of immanence.” This displacement implies, among other things, a shift of aesthetic orientation in which the anthropocentric bias of traditional aesthetics, at once scrutinized and reinvigorated by Lacan, gives way to a theory of expressive technique that spans the difference between human and non-human species and in so doing erodes the distinction, so dear to the structuralist ethos in which Lacan participated, between natural and cultural, animal and human orders.

percept AFFect concept:FLesh house cosMos

The significance that architecture has in the elaboration of this fundamentally ecological theory of the work of art can be principally observed in an essay from What is Philosophy?, “Percept, Affect, Concept.”57 The conception

pArt 2:perhAps Architecture BeGins with the AniMAL:

the DeLeuziAn turn


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of architecture that emerges from that discussion unfolds in significant dialogue with the writings of Deleuze’s former student, the architect and architectural theorist Bernard Cache. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s own discussion, in A Thousand Plateaus, of the theories of “consolidation” and “consistency” to be found in the work of the Belgian social philosopher Eugène Dupréel, Cache describes architecture as an art of the frame, and goes on to argue that “architecture would be the art of introducing intervals into a territory in order to construct frames of probability.”58 Cache’s theory of architecture as an art of the frame is in turn taken up by Deleuze and Guattari in “Percept, Affect, Concept,” where it is explicitly linked to their conception of the work of art as “a bloc of sensation”:

Bernard Cache is able to list a certain number of enframing forms that do not determine in advance any concrete context or function of the edifice: the wall that cuts off, the window that captures or selects (in direct contact with the territory), the ground-floor that wards off or rarifies (“rarifying the earth’s relief so as to give a free path to human trajectories”), the roof that envelops the place’s singularity (“the sloping roof puts the edifice on a hill”). Interlocking these frames or joining these planes…is a complete system rich in points and counterpoints. The frames and their joins hold the compound of sensations, hold up figures, and intermingle with their upholding, with their own appearance. These are the faces of a dice of sensation.59

However Deleuze and Guattari are here quick to point out that the architectural act of enframing, and the territorial imperative that it communicates, needs always to be thought alongside an apparently countervailing operation of de-framing or de-territorialization: “But however extendable this system (of the architectural frame) may be, it still needs a vast plane of composition that carries out a deframing following lines of flight that pass through the territory only in order to open it onto the universe, that go from the house-territory to the town-cosmos.”60

It is in the context of a discussion of these interlocking frames and the blocs of sensation they produce that Deleuze and Guattari make the assertion that the original abode or element of sensation is not “the flesh,” but “the house,” or, more precisely, that “flesh” becomes susceptible to sensation as something distinct from chaos only on the basis of the tectonic structure or “framework” in which it is embedded:

Flesh is only the thermometer of a becoming. The flesh is too tender. The second element is not so much bone or skeletal structure as house or framework. The body blossoms in a house (or an equivalent, a spring, a grove). Now, what defines the house are “sections,” that is to say, the pieces of differently oriented planes that provide flesh with its framework—foreground and background, horizontal and vertical sections, left and right, straight and oblique, rectilinear and curved. These sections are walls but also floors, doors, windows, French windows, and mirrors, which give sensation the power to stand on its own within autonomous frames. They are the sides of the bloc of sensation.61

To this flesh-house pair, Deleuze then adds a third element, cosmos, that universe onto which the house is open: “The third element is the universe, the cosmos. Not only does the open house communicate with the landscape, through a window or a mirror, but the most shut up house opens onto a universe…. A universe-cosmos is not flesh. Neither is it sections, joined up parts of planes, or differently oriented planes, although it may be constituted by the connection of every plane to infinity. But ultimately the universe appears as the area of plain, uniform color [l’aplat], the single great plane, the colored void, the monochrome infinite.”62 With the introduction of this cosmic scale of sensation (exemplified, in Deleuze and Guattari’s argument, by the monochrome plane), we move from the processes of territorialization that emerge in the interaction of flesh and house to processes of “deterritorialization” that span the multiple scales of the cosmos.

“Animal, plant, and molecular becomings correspond to cosmic and cosmogenetic forces, to the point that the body disappears into the plain color or becomes part of the wall or, conversely, the plain color buckles and whirls around in the body’s zone of indiscernibility. The being of sensation is not the flesh but the compound of nonhuman forces of the cosmos, of man’s nonhuman becomings and of the ambiguous house that exchanges and adjusts them, makes them whirl around like winds.”63

Such a deterritorialization implies, in Deleuze and Guattari’s argument, a concept of sensation from which all reference to human experience has been expunged. The privileged locus for this dehumanization of aesthetic experience is the percept, a term that in Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical vocabulary refers to an organization of sensation anterior to or below the organizations produced by the human perceptual




apparatus. The philosophical prototype for this atomization of the contents of human perception is Leibniz’s little perceptions, those infinitesimal blocs of sensation whose concatenation may produce, for instance, the undifferentiated moaning of the sea:

For an even better understanding of the petites perceptions which we cannot individually distinguish in the crowd, I am wont to employ the illustration of the moaning or sound of the sea, which we notice when we are on the shore. In order to hear this sound we must hear the parts of which the whole sound is made up, that is to say the sounds that come from each wave, although each of these little sounds makes itself known only in the confused combination of all the sounds taken together, that is to say in the moaning of the sea, and no one of the sounds would be observed if the wave which makes it were alone. For we must be affected a little by the motion of the wave, and we must have some perception of each of these sounds, however little they may be; otherwise we should not have the perception of a hundred thousand waves, for a hundred thousand nothings cannot make something.64

The atomization of the contents of human perception that this aesthetic of the percept demands implies a simultaneous dismantling of the perceiving subject and its corresponding object: “The aim of the work of art is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the status of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state or another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensation.”65

It is important to stress the extent to which Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in this “pure being of sensation” is informed by their broader onto-cosmological commitments, namely their hylozoism. If the work of art finds neither its genesis in an anthropologically determined subject nor its necessary expression in an object in which that subject would view the reflection of its own facultative powers, this is owing to the fact that the work of art has its genesis in forms of organization more primitive than those that arise at the level of the subject and its objects. Whereas for a venerable tradition extending from Aristotle to Kant and beyond, it was the a priori power of either a substance (hypokeimenon) or a subject (subjectum) that gave form to matter, for Deleuze and Guattari, such form is immanent in the self-organizing properties of matter itself. Deleuze and Guattari’s vitalist aesthetics therefore assume both a material continuity

and a formal homology between the individuations that appear across the several strata of cosmic becoming: mineral, vegetal, animal, human. The same principles of self-organization and associated mathematical regularities are understood to be unfolding within the processes of individuation occurring on all four levels, so that the formation of animal and human becomings are seen as playing out the same laws as do the formation of, say, crystals or hurricanes. These inter-scalar becomings are the myriad shapes taken by a single law of expression, a law whose principle or essence is rhythm. The territorial implications of that law are clarified in A Thousand Plateaus, where Deleuze and Guattari argue that:

The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being, not in the sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that carries or produces them. These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is not the constituted mark of a subject but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode. The signature is not the indication of a person; it is the chancy formation of a domain.66

It is in the context of exploring the flesh-house-cosmos complex in which this territorial conception of the work of art unfolds that Deleuze and Guattari venture their hypothesis that “perhaps art begins with the animal,” going on to add that by animal they mean the living being that claims a territory that includes the house. As in their discussions of architecture in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari stress once more the fact that this territorial framework establishes the animal as locus and agent of a set of functions that, far from being strictly organic-functional, represent so many forms of expressive behavior: “The territory system transforms a number of organic functions—sexuality, procreation, aggression, feeding. But this transformation does not explain the appearance of the territory and the house; rather it is the other way around: The territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities, of sensibilia that cease to be merely functional and become expressive features, making possible a transformation of functions.”67

As we have observed, this “emergence of pure sensory qualities” marks a point of continuity between human works of art and the adaptive behaviors taken up by non-human species in their negotiation of their


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respective milieux. Drawing on the work of the Estonian biosemiotician Jakob von Uexküll, Deleuze and Guattari remark:

Expressiveness is already diffused in life, and the simple field of lilies might be said to celebrate the glory of the skies. But with the territory and the house it becomes constructive and erects ritual monuments of an animal mass that celebrates qualities before extracting new causalities and finalities from them. This emergence of pure sensory qualities is already art, not only in the treatment of external materials but in the body’s postures and colors, in the songs and cries that mark out the territory… Every morning the Scenopoetes dentirostris, a bird of the Australian rain forests, cuts leaves, makes them fall to the ground, and turns them over so that the paler internal side contrasts with the earth. In this way it constructs a stage for itself like a readymade; and directly above, on a creeper or a branch, while fluffing out the feathers beneath its beak to reveal their yellow roots, it sings a complex song made up from its own notes and, at intervals, those of other birds that it imitates: It is a complete artist.68

On the basis of this naturalization of aesthetic experience, Deleuze and Guattari go on to elaborate a trans-species theory of the work of art that draws significant inspiration from Uexküll’s theory of “counterpoint,” a term the biosemiotician borrowed from music to describe the way in which the Umwelten inhabited by distinct species intersect or overlap:

Every territory, every habitat, joins up not only its spatiotemporal but its qualitative planes or sections: a posture and a song for example, a song and a color, percepts and affects. And every territory cuts across the territories of other species or intercepts the trajectories of animals without territories, forming interspecies junction points. It is in this sense that, to start with, Uexküll develops a melodic, polyphonic, and contrapuntal conception of Nature. Not only does birdsong have its own relationships of counterpoint but it can find these relationships in the songs of other species, and it may even imitate these other songs as if it were a question of occupying a maximum of frequencies. The spider’s web contains “a very subtle portrait of the fly,” which serves as its counterpoint.... The tick is organically constructed in such a way that it finds its counterpoint in any

mammal whatever that passes below its branch, as oak leaves arranged in the form of tiles find their counterpoint in the raindrops that stream over them. This is not a teleological conception but a melodic one in which we no longer know what is art and what is nature (“natural technique”).... These relationships of counterpoint join planes together, form compounds of sensations and blocs, and determine becomings.69

It is in the context of pursuing this naturalization of artistic technique that Deleuze and Guattari assert that “art begins not with the flesh but with the house,” going on to claim that “architecture is the first of the arts.” Of course, Deleuze and Guattari are not alone in claiming architecture as the first of the arts. In this, they were preceded by Hegel, who located the origins of art in the symbolic architecture of the ancient Egyptians. However their reasoning is quite different than Hegel’s. Whereas for Hegel architecture is the first because in it the artistic aspiration to produce the sensuous semblance of an extraneous spiritual content first emerges from its animistic prehistory, from Deleuze and Guattari’s post-Darwinian perspective architecture is the first because it is the only art that can be thought to predate the origin of man. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the territorial imperative architecture expresses is already resident in any number of non-human species, where, as we have seen Deleuze and Guattari observe, it serves to regulate sexuality, procreation, aggression, and feeding, much as it does for humans, and where it moreover results, in at least some of these species, in the fabrication of dwellings as remarkable for their aesthetic élan as for their structural ingenuity. Architecture therefore plays an important role in Deleuze and Guattari’s biosemiotic theory of the work of art, that of producing a continuity between the aesthetic practices associated with the human animal and the expressive, extra-functional dimension of the practices of territorialization observable in non-human animal species. If this continuity is important to them, it is because the process of “becoming-animal” represents for them an important moment in the larger project of de-territorializing the human subject, of liberating the active forces that lie dormant in this subject so that these forces may reconnect with their cosmic origins. The vitalist gamble that Deleuze and Guattari make is that the rediscovery of this cosmic dimension is also the rediscovery of the political dimension of such forces. This gamble is inextricably linked to their affirmation that politics is always, and has always been, biopolitics.




It will be immediately apparent how different this conception of architecture is from the one to be found in Lacan’s two passing references to the art of building in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Whereas for Lacan architecture’s interest is situated within, albeit at the edge of, a subject-object nexus that is the zoologically unique product of the human animal’s premature natality and the imaginary and symbolic mediations of its relations with its surroundings arising therefrom, for Deleuze and Guattari architecture is the first of the arts because it is in architecture that art first finds its vocation for “wresting the percept from perceptions of objects and the status of a perceiving subject,” so as to “extract a bloc of sensation,” a vocation that the human animal apparently shares with several other species. Moreover, as I have already suggested on several occasions, these differing conceptions of architecture are emblematic of broader philosophical differences.

We have seen that Lacan’s ontological commitments were resolutely dualist, informed by both an acute sense that the antinomies arising from the dialectic of history and nature were irresolvable and a related insistence on the distinct modes of temporalization that history and nature respectively imply. His interest in the singularity of the human condition turned on his conviction that it represents not merely the privileged but the sole locus for the playing out of these antinomies. For their part, following a monist legacy that is neo-Spinozian rather than neo-Hegelian in origin, Deleuze and Guattari reject the distinction between cosmological time and historical time that Lacan inherits from Kojéve, and with it the very notion of a subject with a historical destiny distinct from its biological emergence and demise. In recent history, interest in the differend that divides Lacan’s neo-mechanism from Deleuze and Guattari’s neo-vitalism has been piqued by the critiques of Deleuzian vitalism offered by the two thinkers who have developed the thought of Lacan with greatest consequence in the contemporary setting, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. As I have observed in the prelude to this work, “Man is a Fatal Disease of the Animal,” the dispute is best considered not as a dispute between a philosophy of immanence and a philosophy of transcendence (however much Lacan may appropriate theological schemas like creatio ex nihilo); rather, it is to be conceived as the difference between a philosophy of seamless immanence in which man and his experience of time are entirely integrated into the cycles of generation and decay that define natural life and a philosophy of leaky immanence in which man would be the leak, not some super-ontological “Good-beyond-all-Being”

(epekeina tés ousias) but a failed finitude. I have already stated my inclination toward the latter position, not least because of the place it retains for the concept of the “subject” in both aesthetic and political realms. In what remains, I would like to explore in greater detail what I understand the political implications of this insistence on the subject to entail. To do so, I will shift the discussion away from the thought of Lacan and toward the theory of subjectivation elaborated by a contemporary thinker, a fellow traveler of Badiou and Žižek, Jacques Rancière. Our discussion of Rancière will also compel us to pay some passing attention to another French thinker, Claude Lefort, whose efforts to reinvent political philosophy in the last half of the twentieth century were significantly informed by Lacan’s attempt to read Freud’s theory of the unconscious through a structuralist lens. In my very final remarks, I will link Rancière’s conception of politics as a collective process of subjectivation to Pier Vittorio Aureli’s call for an absolute architecture that would contest the depoliticizing drift of contemporary urbanism, an urbanism that Aureli specifically allies with the bio- and geo-political commitments that Deleuze and Guattari champion.

MicropoLitics is no poLitics: reMAininG suBJects,

reMAininG citizensJudgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence.—Gilles Deleuze

Political thought is essentially based on judgment.—Hannah Arendt

Although he is by no means a Lacanian, Jacques Rancière is of interest because he offers an explicit critique of the vitalist underpinnings of Deleuze and Guattari’s eco-aesthetics, one which moreover identifies Deleuze’s and Guattari’s jettisoning of the concept of the subject as effectively short-circuiting the possibility of a meaningful relationship between aesthetics and politics. Moreover, his description of “the distribution of the sensible” as involving first and foremost that coordination of the seeable and the sayable thanks to which a common world can appear resonates significantly with Lacan’s account of the imaginary and symbolic mediations that organize sociality among humans. Moreover, it enriches that


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account with a consideration, largely lacking in Lacan, of the political implications of those mediations.70 Finally, his invocation of the theater as a medial exemplar of the processes of individual and collective subjectivation that constitute the political resonates significantly with Lacan’s account of the identificatory and transferential dynamics at play in the construction of social life. With that in mind, I now turn to Rancière’s theory of “the distribution of the sensible” and the intersection of aesthetic and political registers that it implies. This will establish the terms for our examination of Rancière’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics of the imperceptible and the rapprochement between artistic and political domains that it implies.

Like Deleuze and Guattari, Rancière is acutely interested in the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and in his case, as in theirs, that interest is driven not by a desire to establish artistic or political norms but rather to think of both an art and a politics of the rare, of those moments when the hitherto imperceptible becomes perceptible, and when what was until just now unsayable finds speech. From this fundamental point of affinity we could elaborate more intricate connections between Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the work of art as a “bloc of sensation” and Rancière’s narration of the history of art as the successive regimes for distributing the sensible. To locate their difference, however, we must turn to Rancière’s mistrust of both the vitalist trajectory in contemporary political philosophy (a trajectory he identifies as “neo-Spinozian” and which he associates not only with Deleuze and Guattari’s cosmopolitics but also with the theory of Empire developed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt) as well as of the aesthetics of the imperceptible that we have seen to be the corollary of this vitalism. An examination of the reasons informing that mistrust will lead us to his recuperation of the concept of the subject as an essential ingredient in any thought of the political.

Rancière’s response to the “physico-aesthetics” implicit in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the work of art as a “bloc of sensation” may be described as one of sympathetic skepticism. While supportive of the potential of this conception to unsettle calcified categories and subject positions, Rancière is nevertheless dubious of what he deems to be its uncritical faith in the processes of de-subjectification associated with molecular becoming, a faith he links to an “aesthetic” conception of the work of art whose origins he traces to the German nineteenth-century context.73 To appreciate what is at stake in this assessment of Deleuze’s “aesthetico-politics,” it is

necessary to offer some account of the theory that forms the backdrop to this critique, and that is his theory of “the distribution of the sensible.” This account will compel us to make a brief foray through the work of another French political philosopher, a near contemporary of Rancière’s, Claude Lefort.

At the beginning of his Le Partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique, in the chapter bearing that title, Rancière describes “the distribution of the sensible” as “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.”71 Rancière’s description of this system as a synchronic phenomenon is subject from the very beginning to a diachronic inflection, insofar as this “partage” is articulated across the genealogical series that extends from Plato’s didactic and overtly politicizing treatment of the mimetic arts in his Republic and elsewhere, through Aristotle’s more sympathetic treatment in both his Poetics and his Rhetoric (the basis for classical aesthetics and poetics), to modernity’s aestheticizing re-conception of the arts as Art.

On Rancière’s account, Plato first of all takes up the question of the distribution of the sensible in explicit response to a question concerning the role that the arts might properly play in the functioning of his ideal polis. As Rancière observes, Plato’s strategy consists in polarizing the arts and their associated forms of appearance. At one pole stand those arts—paradigmatically, writing and the theater—that subvert the familiar partitioning of identities, spaces, and activities, and which, in doing so, accelerate the processes of social indeterminacy Plato associates with democracy. At its antipode stand those arts—paradigmatically, music and dance—in which the community directly performs its own unity, thereby avoiding the alienating displacements affected by the tandem forces of democratization and unruly artistic simulation. Here the theater appears, along with literature, as a threat to the ideal of a well-ordered polis, an ideal that on Rancière’s account involves first and foremost a a strictly regulated coordination of the sayable and the visible. According to Rancière, Aristotle’s great achievement in the philosophy of art was to reverse the proscription on the mimetic arts by declaring that its products are not mere simulacra but “fictions,” and are as such possessed of both an epistemological and an ethical value unsuspected by Plato. This reversal installs what Rancière calls the “representative regime” in the arts:




The specificity of the representative regime of the arts is characterized by the separation between the idea of fiction and that of lies. It is this regime that confers autonomy on the arts’ various forms in relationship to the economy of communal occupations and the counter-economy of simulacra specific to the ethical regime of images. This is what is essentially at stake in Aristotle’s Poetics, which safeguards the forms of poetic mimēsis from the Platonic suspicion concerning what images consist of and their end or purpose. The Poetics declares that the arrangement of a poem’s actions is not equivalent to the fabrication of simulacra. It is a play of knowledge carried out in a determined space-time. To pretend is not to put forth illusions but to elaborate intelligible structures.72

Rancière then argues that this valuation of the various arts and the coordinations of the seeable and the sayable that they imply is subject to a significant transformation under conditions of modernity. Two things are at play in this transformation: a rejection of the “representationalist” mandate that orders the Aristotelian conception of the work of art, and the reduction of the multiplicity of disciplinary competencies, medial conditions, and attendant criteria for judgment that characterize the plurality of ancient arts to a fundamentally aesthetic conception of the Work of Art as, in Hegel’s famous phrase, “the sensuous semblance of the Idea” (a semblance that emerges on Rancière’s account at the point where a sensibility cut off from itself makes contact with a thought cut off from itself).

According to Rancière, this anti-representational impulse finds its exemplary expression in painting, which redefines itself, on analogy with writing, as a practice that takes the flatness of the surface of inscription as the occasion for a new, post-mimetic distribution of the sensible, one in which sense experience is brought into novel forms of alignment with the new semiotic modalities and attendant forms of abstract cognition associated with the Cartesian legacy to intellectual and cultural modernity: “The type of painting that is poorly named abstract, and which is supposedly brought back to its own proper medium, is implicated in an overall vision of a new human being lodged in new structures, surrounded by different objects. Its flatness is linked to the flatness of pages, posters, and tapestries. It is the flatness of an interface.”73

The recalibrations of sensation and cognition that issue from these inscriptive arts are thought by their producers and ideological exponents to give birth to

new registers of experience, in the words of the painter Kasimir Malevich, “new forms of life,” forms that are in turn expected to yield a dissolution of the bourgeois distinction between art and life, aesthetics and politics. As Rancière observes, this dissolution, far from being a pure invention of the twentieth-century avant-gardes, was always implicit in the aesthetic conception of the work of art as “sensuous semblance of the Idea.” The passage of the eternal Idea through the sensible form raises questions concerning the ontological genesis and significance of such forms, questions that, by virtue of their very ontological character, impose on us the burden of conceiving artistic forms on a continuum with non-artistic forms. Hence, however counter-intuitively, it is the aesthetic conception of art, and more especially the special affinity between philosophy and the arts that this aesthetic conception articulates, that on Rancière’s account first embroils art in an inextricable complicity with non-art, that is to say with what it calls “life.”

As with modern painting and writing, the modern theater is thought by Rancière to participate in a post-representational coordination of the sayable and the visible, one in which abstraction becomes a means for suspending classical art’s mimetic mandate. And like modern painting and writing, the modern theater aspires to an overcoming of the division between art and life, politics and experience, be it in the manner of a thoroughgoing alienation from the spectacle, as in the dramaturgy of Bertolt Brecht, or a thoroughgoing immersion, as in the re-sacralization of the theater to which Antoinin Artaud aspired. Indeed, the way in which the modern theater brings into view the processes of subjectivation that are at stake in the politicization of the sensorium gives it a certain privilege in Rancière’s account of the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Tellingly, this theatricalist understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and politics emerges in his argument at precisely the point that Rancière undertakes to distinguish his own conception of that relationship from the neo-Spinozian conception advocated by Deleuze and Guattari, and Negri and Hardt.

As Rancière observes, the critique of theatrical spectacle that is first articulated by Plato, only to be repeated in various ways by a long line of theorists extending from St. Augustine to Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Michael Fried, turns on the intellectual passivity and credulous susceptibility to manufactured illusion that such spectacles are thought to provoke. What is specific to the modern theater is, according to Rancière, its attempt to counter this critique by producing a performative


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medium in which the representationalist distinction between actor and spectator would be suspended or dissolved. Rancière then draws a comparison between the forms of subjectivation associated with this post-representational theater and the forms of visible anonymity assumed by the collective subject of his project of political emancipation, a subject that he continues to designate with the classical moniker, “the people.” If, however, the forms of subjectivation associated with this novel performative medium seek to dissolve the distinction between actor and spectator, it is only to replace it with another, the distinction between actor and mask. It is Rancière’s insistence on this latter distinction that allies his conception of the theater with Diderot’s, pace Rousseau. Rather than advocating a rejection of the spectacle, à la Rousseau, or even its detournement, à la Debord, Rancière insists that the spectacular, which is to say the imposition of a distance between actor and mask, is an essential feature of the forms of equality he associates with the people. “The essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space. It is to get the world of its subjects and its operations to be seen.”74 Indeed, it is precisely this spectacular dimension of the project of political emancipation that distinguishes his “people” from the “population” that Foucault first described as the object of biopolitics and the new forms of policing it introduces. On Rancière’s account, the characteristic stratagems of the police are decidedly unspectacular. For if it is the people, with their multiple forms of anonymous appearance, that turn the streets into stages, it is the police who tear those stages down, breaking up expressions of collective discontent in the name of restoring the smooth flow of traffic. This distinction between “the people” and “the population” is keyed to the opposition that structures Rancière’s conception of the political as such, a distinction between consensus and what he calls dissensus. As Rancière puts it in an essay titled “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics”:

Morality implied the division between fact and right. By the same token it also implied the division between different forms of morality and of rights, the division between ways of opposing morality and rights. The suppression of this division has been given a privileged name: it is called consensus. Consensus is also a catchword of our time. However, there is a tendency to minimize its meaning. Some reduce it to a global agreement between government and opposition parties. Others see it, more broadly, as a new style of government that gives priority to

discussion and negotiation in conflict resolution. Yet consensus means much more than that: properly understood, it defines a mode of symbolic structuration of the community that evacuates the symbolic core constituting it, namely dissensus. A political community is in effect a community that is structurally divided, not between divergent interest groups and opinions, but divided in relation to itself. A political “people” is never the same thing as the sum of a population. It is always a form of supplementary symbolization in relation to the counting of the population and its parts.75

Rancière’s description of the “supplementary symbolization” constitutive of “a political ‘people’” is an essential ingredient in his counter-Deleuzian conception of politics and its implications need to be clearly understood. His use of this phrase is explicitly indebted to another French political philosopher, Claude Lefort’s definition of politics as “the symbolic institution of the social,” about which we must now say a little.

The notion of the symbolic that is in play in Lefort’s definition of politics itself derives from three principal sources: Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In all three cases, the theory of the symbolic was designed to express “the schematic matrix” that separates social conduct in any given society from instinctual behavior, and which, in doing so, confers on such conduct a historicity that must be thought to be lacking in the temporality proper to any biological process. What is more, the advent of this historicity, in which the human animal is decisively banished from the order of nature, is thought to produce a state of alienation or self-division in the human subject, an alienation all three conceive as endemic to the human condition. A brief description of both the differences and affinities between Lefort and Rancière on the question of the symbolic dimension of politics may help bring into focus the link between Lacan’s theory of the subject and Rancière’s description of the processes of individual and collective subjectivation that are at play in the staging of a political people. With that link in place, we will then return to our examination of Rancière’s theatricalist critique of the affirmative biopolitics advocated by Deleuze and Guattari, and Hardt and Negri.

Of the three just mentioned sources for Lefort’s theory of the symbolic, Merleau-Ponty, whose posthumous papers Lefort edited, is inarguably the most significant. Whereas Levi-Strauss and Lacan’s theories of the symbolic were deeply marked by




that passion for formalization, and in particular for mathematical formalization, that defined the structuralist moment, Lefort followed his former teacher in seeking a phenomenology of the social world capable of comprehending the implications of that experience of alienation or self-division alluded to above for the organization of collective experience, and this phenomenology was explicitly critical of the positivism lurking in any attempt to formalize this division along structuralist lines.75 This is not to say that structuralism did not shape Lefort’s theory of the political as “symbolic institution of the social,” as we shall see. From Lefort’s neo-phenomenological perspective, the self-division constitutive of the social emerges sometimes as the division between society and its mode of symbolic institution, sometimes as the division between society and its symbolic representation. In both cases, institution and representation, the relationship between society and its symbolic articulation is riven by paradoxes of both a temporal and spatial nature, paradoxes that render the political less the object of a disinterested inquiry than a perennial enigma.

In his consideration of the temporal paradoxes associated with this enigma, Lefort was significantly informed by the theory of “institution” that Merleau-Ponty proposed in his lectures at the College de France in the academic year 1954–55. In his written summary of these lectures, Merleau-Ponty suggests that institutions concern “those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequel or history—or again the events which deposit a sense in me, not just as something surviving or as a residue, but as a call to follow, the demand of a future.”76 What Lefort finds especially compelling in this conception of institution is the instaurational aporia, or series of related aporiae, that it exposes, the chiasmi of event and advent, institutor and instituted that it puts in play. As Lefort explains, that the institution “deposits a sense in me” prior to any activation of conscious will or intention implies that the forms of subjectivation to which it gives rise are incompatible with the forms associated with “constitution” in the Kantian or Fichtean sense, viz., with a self-positing act in which consciousness assumes its autonomy. According to Lefort, the specifically temporal paradox deriving from this chiasmus of instituting and instituted moments concerns the fact that the symbolic founding act must always be the repetition or reenactment of an anterior event or origin:

He [Merleau-Ponty] takes it [the term “institution”] in its double sense—the action that provides a beginning and a state of the thing established, for example, the state of being social, political, or juridical—but with this essential difference, that institution as foundation is not considered as the product of an act and that institution as establishment contains at the same time the possibility of its perpetuation, by means of repetition, indeed the possibility of its petrification as well as the possibility of its reactivating force…. Merleau-Ponty distinguishes immediately the problematic of institution from that of constitution (in the Kantian sense). He rejects, along with the idea of a constituting consciousness, that of a world in which nothing would be discovered that had not been constituted by its operations.77

This structure of immemorial repetition that founds the first time of every event of symbolic institution—and which bears an at least superficial resemblance to the theory of iterability later proposed by Jacques Derrida—is what compels Merleau-Ponty to assert that “time is the very model of the institution.”78

As for the spatial paradox forming the other register of the political enigma, it concerns not merely the fact that the outside is inside the social, not merely that a certain quasi-transcendence vitiates the immanence of social relations, preventing them from establishing any second nature; it more urgently concerns the fact that this outside that is inside serves as the locus for the virtual genesis of the social. The political, as the site of this original and insuperable opening of the social to what lies beyond it, at once institutes the social, and, in instituting it, divides the social from itself. According to Lefort, this renders the relationship of the political to the theological at once intimate and irreducible:

When he [the philosopher] thinks of the principles that generate society and names them political, he automatically includes religious phenomena within his field of reference. This does not mean that in his view the religious and the political can coincide. It does, however, mean that one cannot separate the elaboration of a political form—by virtue of which the nature and representation of power and social division, and by virtue of which the various dimensions of the human experience of the world can simultaneously become organized—from the elaboration of a religious form—by virtue of which the realm of the visible can acquire death, and by virtue of


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which the living can name themselves with reference to the dead, whilst the human word can be guaranteed by as primal pact, and whilst rights and duties can be formulated with reference to a primal law. In short, both the political and the religious bring thought face to face with the symbolic, not in the sense in which the social sciences understand the term, but in the sense that, through their internal articulations, both the political and the religious govern access to the world.79

Reading these remarks from within the context of Lefort’s larger consideration of politics as the symbolic institution of the social, we may add that, if both religion and politics bring us face to face with the symbolic, it is insofar as each in its own way refers to what Lefort describes as the “excess of being over appearance,” an excess he then refers to the internal division he follows both Merleau-Ponty and Lacan in linking to the specificity of human experience. It is by reason of this “excess” that, according to Lefort, all political regimes, all forms of power, “gesture to something outside,” while at the same time founding their immanent domain in this very gesture: “Whatever its form, it (power) always refers to the same enigma: that of an external-internal articulation, of a division which institutes a common space, of a break which establishes relations, of a movement of externalization of the social which goes hand in hand with its internalization.”80 This “enigma…of an external/internal relation,” this intimate alterity that the political places at the heart of the social, would be the spatial correlative to those temporal paradoxes noted above. We ought perhaps to observe, if only in passing, the resemblance between this “external-internal articulation” and das Ding that stands in the background of Lacan’s description of architecture as the circumscription of the void in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis.

On the basis of this conception of politics as the “symbolic institution of the social,” Lefort’s writings offer a schematic history of the political, one which reads not, as in Hannah Arendt (to whom both Lefort and Ranciere owe a significant debt), as a quarrel between ancient and moderns, but rather as a quarrel between Medievals and Moderns, that is to say, between the political-theological fictions of embodied sovereignty that first emerged in the Middle Ages, and which presided over the political imagination of Europe until the eighteenth century, and a democratic conception of sovereignty (political corollary of the modes of cultural and theoretical autonomy associated with the project of Enlightenment) in which power is disembodied, so as to become an

“empty place.” Here the formalizing impulse endemic to the structuralist enterprise, and which Lefort explicitly eschewed, may be thought to have come in through the backdoor. For Lefort’s empty place of democratic power (lieu vide) resembles nothing so much as that “void” that structuralist thought placed—under various guises (the floating signifier, the value degree zero, the object =x)—at the very center of the notion of structure, and which was an essential ingredient in its project of formalization. Here is how Lefort describes this “empty place” at the center of the modern democracy:

The modern democratic revolution is best recognized in this mutation: there is no power linked to a body. Power appears as an empty place and those who exercise it are mere mortals who occupy it only temporarily or who could install themselves in it only by force or cunning. There is no law that can be fixed, whose articles cannot be contested, whose foundations are not susceptible of being put into question. Lastly, there is no representation of a center and of the contours of society: unity cannot now efface social division. Democracy inaugurates the experience of an ungraspable, uncontrollable society in which the people will be said to be sovereign, of course, but whose identity will constantly be open to question, whose identity will remain latent.

What is essential in the difference between the notion of power invested in an embodied sovereign and power as localized within “an empty place” is the fact that in the latter instance “division,” rather than being referred to an anterior nature or substance, comes to be seen as the essence of the social. In terms that draw not only on Lacan’s topography of the unconscious but also on the psychoanalyst’s insistence that “there is no Other of the Other,” Lefort maintains that it is this notion of power as a “lieu vide” that positively distinguishes the modern conception of democracy from its ancient antecedent, preventing it from either referring itself to any positive outside or from representing itself in any positive image:

Of all the regimes that we know, it (modern democracy) is the only one to show that power is an empty place and to have thereby maintained a gap between the symbolic and the real…. It could of course be rightly pointed out that the principle of a power that men are forbidden to appropriate had already been asserted in classical democracy, but it need scarcely be pointed out that power still had a




positive determination in that representation of the City rested upon a discrimination based upon natural criteria or—and this amounts to the same thing—supernatural criteria…. The old Greek formula to the effect that power is in the middle…still indicates the presence of a group which has an image of itself, of its space and its bounds. The reference to an empty place, by contrast, eludes speech insofar as it does not presuppose the existence of a community whose members discover themselves to be subjects by the very fact of their being members…. The reference to an empty place…implies a reference to a society without any positive determination, which cannot be represented by the figure of a community. It is because the division of power does not, in a modern democracy, refer to an outside that can be assigned to the Gods, the City, or holy ground; because it does not refer to an inside that can be assigned to the substance of the community. Or, to put it another way, it is because there is no materialization of the Other—which would allow power to function as a mediator, no matter how it were defined—that there is no materialization of the One—which would allow power to function as an incarnation.81

Bearing in mind both Lefort’s definition of the political as symbolic institution of the social and his conception of the novelty of the modern democratic experiment, let us now return to Rancière in order to examine both the degree of affinity and the degree of difference between these two thinkers.

Rancière responds explicitly to Lefort in his “Ten Theses on Politics,” paying special attention to his notion that in modern democracies power is equivalent to an empty-place. Drawing a link between this conception of democratic power as a “lieu vide” and his own characterization of democracy as the action by which a part hitherto excluded from participation in institutional politics makes itself seen and heard, Rancière credits Lefort with discovering the “structural void” that divides the space of the political from the space of police in the French neo-classical sense: “The people is the supplement that inscribes ‘the count of the unaccounted for’ or ‘the part of those who have no part.’ These expressions should be understood in their…structural sense. It is not the laboring and suffering populace that comes to occupy the terrain of political action and to identify its name with that of the community. What is identified by democracy with the role of the community is an empty, supplementary part that separates the

community from the sum of the parts of the social body. This separation, in turn, grounds politics in the action of supplementary subjects that are a surplus in relation to any (ac)count of the parts of society. The whole question of politics lies in the interpretation of this void…. The interpretation of democracy posed by Claude Lefort gave the democratic void its structural meaning.”82

However, Rancière argues that there are two ways of interpreting this void and goes on to assert that the difference between Lefort’s conception of democracy and his own correlates to the difference between these interpretations: “But the theory of the democratic void can be interpreted in two different ways: first, the structural void refers to an-archy, to the absence of an entitlement to rule that constitutes the very nature of the political space. Secondly, the void is caused by the dis-incorporation of the king’s two bodies—the human and divine body. Democracy, according to this view, begins with the murder of the king, that is, with a collapse of the symbolic thereby producing a dis-incorporated social presence.”83

At best, this is a tendentious gloss on the paradoxes of incorporation that emerge from Lefort’s sense of politics as the symbolic institution of the social, one that confuses these paradoxes with a “logic of sacrifice” more appropriately attributed to Georges Bataille or to the Freud of Moses and Monotheism. In Lefort’s telling, the passage from monarchy to republicanism, from personally incorporated to dis-incorporated forms of power, involves neither a sacrifice—notwithstanding superficial resemblances to the theses of Freud and Bataille—nor “a collapse of the symbolic.” Rather, that passage represents the transition from one form or way of instituting the social to another. In the first form, the gap between the symbolic and real is sutured by means of operations and practices that are imaginary in something like the sense defined by Lacan, that is to say, they involve the production of a fantasmic body; in the second instance, what is involved is the dissolution or dismemberment of that fantasm and its replacement by a formal or structural mechanism that serves not to suture the division between symbolic and real in an image, but rather to keep it open in such a way as to explicitly acknowledge the scandal that is at the heart of the political, i.e., that division is earlier than unity, and forms its secret source. It is his indifference to the paradoxes that structure the question of institution as Lefort inherits it from Merleau-Ponty that prevents Rancière from reflecting on the true nature and significance of Lefort’s theorization of the political. In Rancière, the forms of


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mise en forme and mise en sens that Lefort associates with the sensible institution of a political regime are relegated to participating exclusively in that normalizing and depoliticizing distribution of the sensible that he associates with police. For him, politics, as a vigilant practice of dissensus, places the democratic event at a distance from all forms of institutional legitimacy and permanence. A judicious account of the difference between Lefort and Rancière on the question of the structural void or empty place and the systematic and institutional parameters that determine its efficacy is beyond the scope of this essay. Let me merely stress a final time that Rancière’s association of the void with an original “an-archy” effectively evacuates from the consideration of democracy the institutional exigency that Lefort precisely stresses. Of more pressing interest for our argument is the distance that Lefort and Rancière both take from the politics of the neo-Spinozian tendency in contemporary thought (Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri) on the basis of their understanding of the structural void, and it is to a consideration of Rancière’s description of that distance that I now return.

The fundamentally theatrical conception of collective action and experience that Rancière’s concept of democracy implies is articulated in explicit opposition to both Deleuze’s and Guattari’s anti-theatricalist aesthetics of the imperceptible and Hardt and Negri’s allied appeal to a multitude organized around “a materialist religion of the senses.”47 On Rancière’s account, both are expressions of a same neo-Spinozian tendency in contemporary thought. Rancière’s critique of Deleuze’s participation in this tendency advances on two fronts: on the one hand, it is a critique of Deleuze’s aesthetics of the imperceptible, and the relationship to the political such imperceptibility implies; on the other hand, it is a critique of Deleuze’s political demonization of the theater and the jettisoning of issues concerning the subject and its representation that this demonization implies.

According to Rancière, the privilege that Deleuze gives to the order of individuations that subtend the subject and its history, constituting its molecular substrate, leads him to conceive of the work of art as a “zone of indeterminacy…where the eternal dance of atoms composes new figures and intensities every moment…where the mind becomes disorganized, the world splits, where thought bursts into atoms that are in unity with atoms of matter.”85 Rancière does not deny the interest of Deleuze’s pursuit of this “zone of indeterminacy” and the role it may have in any emancipatory re-distribution of the sensible. However, he is insistent that neither the

aesthetic nor the political can exist in isolation from the stratum of organization designated by the subject. Nor can politics exist in the absence of the representational apparatuses associated with that “symbolic supplement” that on his account serves as a condition of this subject’s historical becoming.

As for the aesthetics of the imperceptible, Rancière argues, with special reference to Deleuze’s treatment of literary texts, that the latter’s liberation of the work of art from any problematic of representation not only leads to a recrudescence of the Romantic conception of the task of the work of art as one of revealing Being’s groundless ground, it also takes covert recourse to the very representational apparatus it claims to reject via the exemplarity it awards to the hero who is charged with personifying these lines of flight. As Rancière puts it in The Flesh of Words: “Deleuze descants on the virtues of molecular multiplicities and haecceities, of non-personal forms of individuation. But his analyses always come to focus on the ‘hero’ of the story.”86

It is this insistence that the subjectivation of “the non-personal forms of individuation” represents not a lapse, but a necessary moment in the articulation of both artistic and political practice that informs Rancière’s second line of attack on the Deleuzian/Negrian conception of both the aesthetic and the political. Here it is their anti-theatrical bias that is under suspicion. As he puts in an interview originally destined for publication in the political journal Dissonance:

The problem is that, in politics, one always creates a stage [une scéne]. They try to avoid the theatrical model…. However, I think that politics takes, more or less, the shape of the constitution of the theater. This means that politics always needs to constitute small worlds on which units take shape; I would call them subjects or “forms of subjectivation”; they stage a conflict, a litigation, an opposition between various worlds. What they [Deleuze and Guattari] want is a world energy that breaks up masses. But this does not constitute politics; that is the problem, at least in my view.87

Elaborating on what he deems to be especially dubious in this political energetic, Rancière argues that his “people” are irreducible to any Deleuzian/Negrian “multitude” just insofar as they are able to bring themselves to visibility in an act of collective self-incorporation whose operative stratum is molar rather than molecular, whose genesis and nature is




unrepentantly artificial, and whose space is subtracted from the milieu organized according to the needs of a biological population. What is more, he conceives the internal gap or division that distinguishes a people from a population on the model of Lacan’s splitting of the subject between utterance (énonciation) and statement (enouncé).

“We are the people” does not mean “we are the masses,” “we are its representatives.” Rather, it means that a group of individuals take on themselves a supplementary form of symbolization, that they undertake to constitute a relation between the we and the people, a relation between two subjects, a relationship between a subject of the utterance and then a subject of the statement [sujet d’ énonciation et puis suject enouncé]. For me politics is never a scene of identity. It always a matter of staging a gap. [Elle met toujours mets en scene un écart]. When one says “we the people,” I would say precisely that “we” and “the people” are not the same thing; politics takes place in the gap between the two…. For me politics is the constitution of a theatrical and artificial sphere. Whereas what they [Deleuze /Guattari and Hardt/Negri] really want is a stage of reality [une scene de réalité]…. The opposition between the molecular and the molar…always draws us back to the need for a political subject that would be real, that would be a truly vital energy at work. I believe that a political subject is a type of theatrical being, temporary and localized.88

To imagine an architecture adequate to this type of theatrical being, this subject that is split all the way down, would be to imagine an architecture capable of contesting the unqualified celebration of the processes of de-subjectification apparent in both Deleuze and Guattari’s micropolitics and their aesthetics of the imperceptible. It would be to imagine a theatrical architecture, an architecture of the gap between actor and mask, in which the “symbolic supplement” that separates “the people” from “the populace” would find both its representation and its operationalization, and in which, thanks to the re-distribution of the sensible that this “supplement” puts into play, that of which there had hitherto existed no account can come to be counted, that of which there had existed no trace in the order of appearances can come to be seen, and that which had neither voice nor name can come to speak on its own behalf.

While I endorse, for reasons described in the first part of this essay, the counter-vitalist thrust of Rancière’s insistence on a symbolic exigency constitutive of the political, his single-minded emphasis on the transient and improvisatory character of popular spectacle gives short shrift to the relatively permanent frameworks (institutional, perceptual, physical) that establish the conditions under which the temporary and local actions that define democratic politics ever become intelligible. Given the extent to which architecture emerges out of a felt need to establish such frameworks, its capacity to participate in those spontaneous eruptions that Rancière associates with democratic politics would appear to be limited. Conversely, Rancière’s theatricalist theory of the relationship between aesthetics and politics would seem to have limited applicability to architecture. In addition to his single-minded emphasis on the rare and fleeting nature of the political event (with its allergy to all questions of institutionalization, not to mention its expulsion of all questions concerning governance from the realm of the political), Rancière’s aversion to the “spatial turn” in contemporary thought—a turn that has brought the various disciplines devoted to the study of space (urbanism, geography, ecology) into a lively dialogue with the social sciences—would seem to further qualify the applicability of his thinking of the relationship between aesthetics and politics to a consideration of architecture.89 Give these caveats, how shall we understand the relevance of his thought for theorizing the forms of political subjectivation that the discipline of architecture implies in its contemporary condition?

The most important implication that arises out of Rancière’s thinking of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, not to mention the one that marks the most significant affinity between his thought and that of Lacan, concerns its emphasis on the practices of collective subjectivation that define the political as an eminently theatrical enterprise and that separate the forces mobilized in the actions and judgments that define it from the forces that animate natural life. As one of Lacan’s most consequential followers, the philosopher Alain Badiou observes: “Rancière detaches politics from all its vitalist identifications, maintains its status as a declaration, its discursive force, its status as a figure of exception.”90 The architectural implications of Rancière’s quarrel with political vitalism and its aesthetic corollaries begin to come in to view if we compare his theatricalist insistence that “politics always needs to constitute small worlds on which units take shape” to Pier Vittorio Aureli’s advocacy of an architecture of the archipelago in which


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discrete and singular forms each establish a space, a temenos or small world, ordered by criteria other than the “biopolitical” and “geopolitical” criteria that define contemporary urbanism.

Aureli’s hostility to any naturalization of the political is most explicitly stated in The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. Speaking specifically to the naturalist underpinnings of Aristotle’s understanding of man as a zoon politikon, Aureli follows both Lefort and Rancière in stressing that the artificiality of political institutions is inextricably linked to a notion of political space as agonistic, bereft of any cohesive substance that would link the parts of which it is comprised. We have seen Lefort describe this space as a space of “institutionalized contestation,” Rancière, a space of dissensus. For his part, Aureli describes it as the space in-between: “Contrary to Aristotle, who assumed that ‘man is a political animal’ by nature, and thus conceived of the institution of politics as natural, we can say that the political space—the space in between—is not a natural or given phenomena [sic]. Political space is made into the institution of politics precisely because the existence of the space in between presupposes potential conflict amongst the parts that form it.”91

After a fashion that recalls Rancière’s distinction between politics and police, Aureli then goes on to argue that this space of institutionalized contestation corresponds to the Greek notion of the city as polis (i.e., as a finite territory occupied by a multiplicity of free men separated by diverse interests but motivated by a shared concern for the common good). This is a notion that Aureli contrasts with the later Roman notion of the city as urbs (i.e., as a territory whose extent is infinite in principle, finite in fact, and whose spatial organization conforms not to the aesthetic imperatives arising from democratic practices of collective co-appearance, but rather to the infrastructural exigencies associated with administering to and managing the life-needs of a population): “If the infra, as defined by politics, is a trace of the impetus toward separation and confrontation within the city, the infra of the urbs is the space of connection and integration. Urbs is infrastructure, the network that, starting out from the reality and necessity of the habitat, unfolds and aggregates the house within an organic whole that bypasses any political space.”92

Aureli then goes on to argue, with specific reference to the work of Ildefons Cerdá and Ludwig Hilberseimer, that twentieth-and twenty-first-century urbanism, most especially as it finds expression in the discipline of urban planning, at once has its origin in and contributes

significantly to that loss of the meaning of the political whose genesis he identifies in the shift from polis to urbs:

The urbs came to designate a universal and generic condition of co-habitation, which is why…it was used by the inventor of modern urbanism, Ildefons Cerdá, to replace the term ciudad, which he found too restrictive because it referred to “city”—to the political and symbolic conditions of civitas and the Greek polis.

The process of urbanization transcends not only the difference between public and private, but also any difference that matters politically, such as the difference between built space and open, or between what Arendt identified as the three spheres of the human condition: labour, work, and “vita activa.” All of these differences are now absorbed within a process of growth that is no longer dialectical but incremental and therefore infinite. It is not by chance that the key concepts of modernity—such as network, landscape, globalization—share the same conceptual and ideological common ground: the infinite continuity of movement propelled by production which systematically metabolizes anything within a process that always changes, and is thus able to preserve its stability.93

On the basis of this characterization of the transition from polis to urbs, Aureli then makes the somewhat unexpected assertion that it is through an engagement with its formal properties that architecture acquires its political vocation, which consists of delimiting spaces that assert their separateness and singularity in opposition to the metabolic Leviathan of contemporary urbanism. This assertion bears a remarkable resemblance to Rancière’s theatricalist insistence that politics always involves the construction of small worlds. However, Aureli is also insistent, after a fashion that resonates deeply with the theory of the subject we have observed in Lacan, that this separateness is vitiated by the complex of relations from which it first emerged; no less than the Lacanian subject, the Aurelian object only ever appears as a function of or response to “what exists outside it”:

Inasmuch as the formal is defined in terms of being limited rather than self-sufficiency, it is fundamentally relational. In its finitude and specificity, it implies the existence of something outside of itself. In being concerned with “itself,” it necessarily concerns the “other.” For this reason, the formal is against totality




and against generic conceptions of multiplicity. From this perspective we can say that it is precisely the condition of the absoluteness of the form of an object (absolute being understood in its original meaning, “separated”) that implies what exists outside of it. Like the concept of the political, the concept of the formal expresses the condition of a com-positio of parts.94

Hence it is by means of a finite artifact structured by, but critically responsive to, what lies beyond it, that architecture discovers the means for opposing the depoliticizing forces of contemporary biopower as these find expression in contemporary urbanism: “In the age of ‘biopolitics’ and ‘geopolitics,’ where political subjectivity is constantly reformulated in ever more complex and impalpable terms, one can ask whether the bodily experience of form and location can make sense at all. But this is precisely the point. Today a possible and radical counteraction to the ubiquity of the management of urban space in all its forms can be proposed only by reaffirming in the most radical terms the most graspable juncture through which space is made.”95

The example of this architecture against urbanism that Aureli offers in The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture is the work of Mies van der Rohe. On his argument, the Miesian plinth (working in dialectical tension with a building envelope whose formal disposition and material palette reflect the generic space of the modern metropolis) is a device for separating the building’s site from “the flows and organizational patterns that animate the city”96 so as to “reinvent urban space as an archipelago of limited urban artifacts.” In Aureli’s argument: “It is this emphasis on finiteness and separateness that makes artifacts like these the most intense manifestation of the political in the city.” Aureli offers a second, and for our purposes perhaps more salient, example of this absolute architecture in an earlier work, The Project of Autonomy. There he describes the emergence, within progressive elements of an Italian post-war architectural scene dominated by Operaist perspectives on neo-capitalism, two positions with respect to the post-civic, con-urbanist condition that was then emerging from that capitalism, and which Manfredo Tafuri and Giorgio Piccinato were the first to designate with the term “city-territory” in an article written for Casabella continuità in 1962. One position, exemplified by Archizoom, consisted of an unqualified, even hyperbolic, embrace of this new condition in the name of “an autonomous theory that…explained the

city’s dissolution as a consequence of the historical development of capitalism.”97 The other, exemplified by Rossi, insisted on the irreducibility of the social and political dimensions of urban life to the rationale of neo-capitalist planning, and on seeing the individual architectural artifact, not the “city-territory,” as the privileged locus for the articulation of these dimensions. In opposition to the position pursued by Archizoom, whose No-Stop City Aureli very aptly describes as “a city conceived as a unique and endless interior wherein all functions of inhabitation are pushed to their most extreme technological development,” Rossi proposes a theory of architecture in which “the individuality of the urban artifact, the singularity of the locus, and the idea of the city of separate parts” stand in opposition to “the tendentious abstractions of economic determinants and capitalist planning.” Rossi’s insistence on the shaping role that the individual architectural artifact can have in reasserting the political dimension of civic life and thus also the difference between two irreducible but also inextricably linked conceptions of the city, polis and urbs, resonates deeply with Aureli’s conception of an absolute architecture in which the artificial nature of political existence is affirmed and the architectural implications of that affirmation embraced. As I have observed, that conception itself resonates deeply with the conception of the political as a symbolic practice to be found in the writings of Rancière and Lefort. With that in mind, let us consolidate our findings.

In the foregoing, I have suggested that a largely unexamined affinity exists between Lacan’s account of the imaginary and symbolic mediations that define the human subject’s relationship to its environment and Jacques Rancière’s theory of “the distribution of the sensible.” I have also suggested that Rancière’s theory offers an account, largely lacking in Lacan, of the political significance of those mediations, one in which the aesthetic has a central role to play. More specifically, I have argued that the significance of that theory consists in the following: first, its resolute differentiation of politics from police; second, its no less resolute insistence that the expression of this difference is always aesthetic; third, its recognition that what is at stake in such aesthetic expression is a form of subjectivation; and fourth, its insistence that the political space that emerges between the multiple forms of subjectivation making a claim on the distribution and redistribution of the sensible is an agonistic space, a space of dissensus. I have further argued that the limits of this theory consist in its failure to give adequate consideration to the


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institutional exigency that marks politics as a symbolic practice. Alongside these arguments, I have made the further claim that Aureli’s theory of an “absolute architecture” represents a theory of the built environment in which Rancière’s distinction between dissensus and consensus, politics and police is effectively translated into the difference between architecture and urbanism, between a conception of the city as a collective composition comprised of singular artifacts serving to frame (i.e., introject and critically transform) the economic and technological forces from which they arise and a conception of the city as bioconstructive habitat. Taken together, The Project of Autonomy and Toward an Absolute Architecture provide a place for us to begin to rethink the relationship between politics and architecture on the other side of the neo-Spinozian dissolution of politics into micropolitics. As such, they represent an essential complement to Hays’s attempt to rethink architecture from the neo-Lacanian perspective of a subject that still desires it. The great virtue of Aureli’s work consists in its capacity to sharpen our understanding of how such desire might find expression in acts of aesthetic and political judgment.

However, if the concept of the subject subtending these acts is to prove resilient in the face of those developments that on Aureli’s own account render subjectivity “ever more complex and impalpable,” it must be inflected by an appreciation of the new forms of biopower connate with the emergence of what second generation Operaists like Paulo Virno and Maurrizio Lazzarato—working in very close alignment with the affirmative biopolitics of Deleuze and Guattari—call “cognitive capitalism,” forms that putatively bypass the imaginary and symbolic mediations through which the subject takes shape in favor of operations that exercise their power directly on the neural functions of which mental life is composed. In the context of a discussion of the noopolitical implications of “cognitive capitalism,” the architectural theorist and philosopher Sven-Olov Wallenstein has put the issues raised by these new forms with admirable clarity:

If we accept the claim that the current mode of production has moved not only beyond the level of material goods, but also that of information and communication and entered into the space of the noetic and the affective, and that it invests our minds as a plastic entity before all reflexive and conscious response, then the question might be asked if it is at all possible to uphold the ethos a critical culture

bases on ideas of resistance and negation, and beyond this, whether the idea of resistance at all makes sense. In the name of what should we resist, and what resources could be mobilized if our bodies and cognitive faculties are formed and sculpted all the way down to the neural substratum by forces that exceed consciousness.98

Without a doubt, it remains to be seen how the novel forms of networked and distributed intelligence that characterize the current phase of capitalism will transform the processes of individual and collective subjectivation whose emergence at the intersection of aesthetics and politics Ranciere anatomizes. Having said that, the theory of the political that emerges from the thought of Rancière, and that finds corroboration in the theory of the relationship between architecture and politics proposed by Aureli, gives us strong grounds for responding to Wallenstein’s provocative question (“Does resistance make sense?”) in the affirmative. Yes it does make sense to uphold the culture of “resistance,” of “negation and “critique,” which is to say the entire culture of the subject, in the face of these new social technologies and the new forms of social control to which they give rise, for the micropolitical processes that Wallenstein and others associate with cognitive capitalism only become political by virtue of a subject who is not merely influenced by them, but capable of recognizing that influence, determining its significance, and acting on that determination. As both Rancière and Aureli in their differing ways affirm, politics resides not in the space between synapses, but in the space between subjects, subjects who, in coming into relationship with one another, come to be divided from themselves, and who, on the basis of both that relation and that division, are capable of forming not a population, but a people. There, in that ‘between’ space where the dialectic of self-estrangement and social relationship plays out, architecture also resides.

Andrew Payne senior lecturer, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto; researcher and writer on the connections between contemporary culture practice (architecture, literature, and the visual arts) and contem p orary thought, placing these connections against the background of the legacies of intellectual and cultural modernity.

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Andrew Payne_Architecture, Lacan, and Deleuze