Abstract
In this paper, it is my intention to show how Lacan's theory of phobia, as exposed in his fourth seminar on object relations with specific regard to the Little Hans case, deals with space in terms that are not simply analogical. Not only does Lacan produce in this work a topography of phobia, a description of the places of phobia, but he also proposes that phobia, as a particular form of symbolization, is a topology, literally a signifying logos that creates space for the phobic subject. In addition to this, I also aim to sketch briefly the outlines of a possible dialogue between Lacan's topological notion of phobia and Mike Davis's fascinating redefinition of the contemporary late-capitalist Western metropolis, especially Los Angeles, as a constellation of phobic objects.
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Notes
In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre has done with Lacan in a couple of footnotes. By way of the mirror stage, Lacan would turn the subject into a “rigid form”. Lefebvre opposes it to a space that would lead the subject “towards transcendence”. In addition to this, Lacan would incorrectly privilege the epistemological priority of language over space (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 185). As Joan Copjec has remarked with regard to film-studies, the evaluation of Lacan's pronouncements on vision and space is too often confined to (a mistaken analysis of) his early essay on the mirror stage (see Copjec, 1994).
The discovery made by the child in this phase is incomplete insofar as he recognizes only the penis (via the imaginary phallus) and not the vagina.
Some important passages of Seminar IV may be used to defend my claim: “All this happens at the level of the imaginary father. We call him imaginary even because he is integrated into the imaginary relation that forms the psychological support of the relations with the fellow man, which are, properly speaking, relations of the species, the background of every libidinal capture as well as of every aggressive erection” (Lacan, 1994, p. 220; see also ibid., p. 207).
“We should not forget that the phallus of the little boy is not much more valid than that of the little girl” (ibid., p. 193).
However, this is not sexuation proper: here, the child simply identifies himself with the imaginary phallus; sexuation is only properly concluded when he locates himself with respect to the symbolic phallus.
In an earlier lesson of Seminar IV, Lacan gives a clear-cut definition of anxiety: “Anxiety […] emerges each time the subject detaches himself from existence and perceives himself on the verge of being caught again in […] the image of the other […] Anxiety is correlative with the moment in which the subject is suspended between a time in which he does not know any longer where he is and one in which he will be something in which he will never be able to find himself again” (ibid., p. 226, my emphasis).
For a detailed analysis of the three times of the Oedipus complex according to Lacan, see my Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Chiesa, 2007, pp. 61–82).
See, more generally, the entire lesson XXIII of Seminar IV.
This “black spot”, an “out-of-focus element” that functions as a “trace of anxiety” in which Hans “imagines himself as nothing” and is itself masked by the horses of phobia, anticipates most of the characteristics of Lacan's later notion of the objet petit a.
“What are we harnessed to? This is certainly one of the first elements of […] the choice of the signifier ‘horse’ and of its use” (Lacan, 1994, p. 316).
The revelation of the mother's privation should be understood as logically concomitant to her refusal of Hans's advances and the onset of anxiety.
Although Lacan is not very eloquent on this point, I believe that such competition does not necessarily have to entail the child's direct confrontation with the phallic Gestalt of the father's penis. The child might more often find it easier to confront himself with the father's bodily height (as a phallic Gestalt). Children frequently ask questions such as “How tall are you?”, “Will I ever grow as tall as you are?”, etc.
In one of the most famous pages of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud seems to imply that playing with carriages is for a child an alternative to playing the Fort-Da game: “The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied around it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’” (Freud, 2001c, p. 15, my emphasis). Following Lacan's analysis of the importance of the means of transportation in Hans's phobia, should we not rather suggest that these two games are to be regarded as perfectly complementary? The Fort-Da game marks the emergence of the death drive as the other side of the birth of the signifier witnessed by the child's playing with carriages – or, with specific reference to the quotation above, by the child's identifying with that which pulls a carriage.
On Hans's acquisition of a symbolic identity unmediated by the father and, more specifically, the role played by his little sister in the development of his ego-ideal, see Lacan, 1994, pp. 401–408.
Lacan also reminds us that Hans's house is a “house with a view on the entrance of a railway station” (ibid., p. 327).
The passage from the first circuit to the second corresponds to that from demand to desire. This process is dialectically conceived by Lacan in terms of a negation of negation (see Chiesa, 2007, pp. 151–156).
“The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years […] without coming into contact with a working people's quarter” (Engels, 1987, p. 85).
The anxiety-inducing poor are not exempted from the imposition of fear. Davis shows how the model of the “‘fortress’ is([also) being used to recapture the poor as consumers” (Davis, 1998, p. 240). In order to maximize profit in abandoned retail markets, shopping centres that adopt the structure of Bentham's renowned panopticon prison are being built in inner cities.
On the totalitarian implications of a social decline of the paternal function, see Lacan's (1938) Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu (Lacan, 2001, pp. 60–61).
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Chiesa, L. Topology of Fear. Subjectivity 24, 298–313 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.25