Resilience or Reconstruction? A Psychoanalytical Approach to Urban Space After the Attack on the Promenade des Anglais (Nice, 14.07.2016)

Based on observations from a multidisciplinary research program on the spatial effects of the attack on the Promenade des Anglais (Nice, 14 July 2016), this chapter shows that a phenomenon of redoubling the loss is necessary for the individual and collective mourning process. Post-attack life confronts the bereaved with two types of loss: a traumatic loss (the absolute emptiness left by the other in his or her brutal death) and a symboligenic loss (contributing to the reconstruction of urban symbolic differentiations). Two examples of this double loss will be developed: 1) the psychic effects of urban renovation and security work (after the work, the bereaved no longer find the same place where their loved ones died); 2) spontaneous memorials show the lack but, because of their temporary and provisional dimension, they will themselves become missing, promised to disappear. Psychoanalytic theory also assumes two losses in the psychic process of mourning: loss of the love object, but also the sacrificial loss of a piece of oneself in order to separate oneself from the dead person. Psychoanalysis can therefore help to understand the function of this double loss in relation to the unconscious processes that accompany the symbolisation of the loss. In contrast, other observations show how the frozen becoming of some objects attempts to deny their own loss. Two other examples will be given: political discourse on some security devices and the treatment of stuffed animals by the Municipal Archives. In both cases, the second loss is somehow 'prevented' or constantly postponed or denied, and one can wonder how this contributes to or interferes with the work of mourning. In a more fundamental way, this function of the double loss in mourning will allow us to ask the question of the difference between re-construction and resilience. There is indeed a Freudian theory of construction based on the acceptance of loss, which seems radically different from the ideal of resilience (psychological or urban), whose epistemological underpinnings ignore the creative effects of a subjectivising lack.