Theorizing Beyond Joan Copjec’s “The Strut of Vision”

If readers of Lacan had taken Joan Copjec seriously in 1996, they would have understood Lacan through topology and become aware of the logical and historical priority of projective geometry over Euclidian space and its Cartesian manifestations. Copjec’s critique of Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer is under-appreciated, because most Lacanians still do not accept the contention by Lacan and Copjec, that the topology of psychoanalysis began with Pappus of Alexandria (300 CE) and Girard Desargues (1591–1661), and continued through the works of Möbius, Klein, Gauss, and other nineteenth-century mathematicians. Under-appreciation of Lacan’s visualizations has delayed a productive merger of projective geometry and ethnology. Stonehenge, the Egyptian obelisks and pyramids, Mayan ritual centers, and the projections of solar images on floors described in Chinese texts, teach us that “smart architecture” dates back at least to the eleventh century BCE. John Dee’s horologium of 1583 shows how the Renaisssance tempietto drew on this tradition and restated the principles of projective geometry. It is up to a new generation of Lacanian theorists to rise to the proven standards of the past. Here, Copjec’s thesis rings most clearly. The progressivist thesis of Positivism, whose worst ideas have been mind-body dualism and the staircase of “eras” improved by technology, is utterly false. Rather than denounce the false, however, we should promote the truth, whenever it can be found.