As iPSA members and invited authors think about the nature of the proposed book on Lacan+Architecture, positions will develop and be presented here for comment and discussion. The complementary ideas of ‘what Lacan has to say about architecture’ and ‘what architecture has to say about Lacan (or offer Lacanians, in the way of theory) is complicated by the double existence of architecture as human artifact and a field of scholarship. iPSA members are defined by the latter, coming from traditions of teaching and writing that have been called ‘hermetic’. Lorens Holm advocates a convivial development of the project idea, where authors share thoughts about their own work, about architecture scholarship, or about the book project in general. This page is a supplement and appendix for zoom discussions where issues are being debated.
Don Kunze: Letter to Lorens, Andy, John
Responding to conversations between Lorens Holm, John Hendrix, and Andrew Payne, this essay states how Lacan’s ideas and his mi-dire style of writing/speaking constitute a different way of doing theory that carries over into his topological thinking, especially the Borromeo knot and projective figures. We should not be distracted by difficulties but regard them as points of entry into an original way of thinking that connects Lacan to an ancient but obscure idea, to be found in the case of the zairja, an 11c. device based on the idea of finding, for any one effect, multiple causes.
Don Kunze, ‘Architecture, Shadow of the Extimate Smile, Cut of Desire’
There should be a book of essays treating the connections between psychoanalysis not as connections but, rather, blurred overlaps. There is a parallax reading of Lacan that sees emergent shapes if and only if the texts are considered orthographically, anamorphically. These essays propose, as any essay about Lacan and Architecture must propose, an antithesis to the “about” logic of seeing two subjects separated by a problematic middle. The middle already exists; the question is one of how to cultivate a parallax view that equalizes details as resonant rather than different. [Read the full essay]
Andy Payne, ‘Framing Lacan and Architecture’
In the interest of clarifying my own sense of the thematic considerations that should animate this collection, I want to restate a remark I made in our last meeting concerning the singular status of works of architecture as cultural artifacts. That singularity concerns the fact that such works are simultaneously objects designed for aesthetic veneration and territorial dispositifs designed for accommodation of collective human conduct. A part of what I find promising in Lacan’s thought is that it seems to offer tools for enriching our understanding of both of these dimensions of architectural theory and practice. [READ FULL ESSAY]
Lorens Holm
It seems to me that the overarching project is to reconcile 20th century thinking on subjectivity — and in particular, the text of Lacan — with contemporary architectural discourse and practice. We are asking where architectural thinking appears in Lacan, or is nascent in Lacan and can be realised when put in dialogue with architectural discourse, and where Lacanian thinking lies nascent and unacknowledged in architectural discourse.
In the terms of my paper (imagined, unwritten, unabstracted), we are claiming that psychoanalysis and architecture are neighbouring discourses, with all the attendant relief and anxiety that this proximity may cause.
We are putting a single person (Lacan) in dialogue with a discourse (architecture), an asymmetry which is significant, although I don’t know how. By default, every time we discuss Lacan we are putting a single person in relation to a discourse, but usually it is the discourse that he puts himself in, not a neighbouring discourse.