Lacan’s Thing with Architecture: Rimming the Void/Petrifying Pain

With a view to illuminating the role that architecture plays in Jacques Lacan’s seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, this paper undertakes to do three things: first, to place Lacan’s references to architecture in this seminar in the context of his description of artistic sublimation as “the elevation of the object to the dignity of a Thing”; second, to situate that formula within the context of his broader treatment of the Thing (das Ding); and third, to highlight the degree to which his interest in the Thing is informed by an early and perduring preoccupation with the singular rapport that human animals establish with their environments as a result of the helplessness (Hilflosigkeit) that marks the earliest stages of their development. As I observe, that “elevation” Lacan invokes in his formula for artistic sublimation concerns the creation of an emptiness that he describes as marking the locus of an internally generated Unlust that he follows Freud in placing at the center of the Nebenmensch Thing. Such would be the connection between these two discussions of the Thing. Architecture plays a central role in forging this connection, since it is chiefly with reference to that art that Lacan links the emptiness that is the creator’s special product with a sinkhole of pain whose origin is endogenous.