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Lacan, the City, and the Utopian Symptom

An Analysis of Abject Urban Spaces

University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada

This article examines the concept of utopia by focusing on the distance between the utopian myths and the actual city they originate in. While the individual work of utopian fiction offers to the attentive reader a map of the neuroses of the author, when taken in general as a genre or type of social conception, it provides the reader with a map of the city as a neurotic social object. Utopia can thus be read as a type of neurotic psychological topography. From this analytic basis, a different mode of inquiry may be deployed, a mode of inquiry that begins with specific urban artifacts that are omitted from the utopian model. In this analysis, the author focuses on the cemetery and the sewer. These abject or pathological urban sites carry a form of contaminative excess within their structures and as such become at once the focal point of anxiety and irreducible fascination.

Key Words: Jacques Lacan • Giorgio Agamben • Georges Bataille • Utopia • death drive • abjection

This version was published on November 1, 2008

Space and Culture, Vol. 11, No. 4, 459-474 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1206331208320482


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