A psychoanalysis of polis A reason for studies on spacious political practices

Abstract

The article makes an attempt to show how the birth of modernity is connected in Europe with the development of towns, and constitution of a certain model of awareness that is political in reality, that is, grounded in affective and ideological relations where the town and its internal dynamics are an image. Using analyses by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, I claim that the town constructs a modern and de-centred subjectivity. I would particularly like to ponder over the possibility of applying a psychoanalytical method to the interpretation of this “unconscious polis” (through e.g. “spatial analysis” referred to as such by E.W. Soja) What I concentrate on is above all a wide series of phenomena covering practices of an every-day life, artistic interferences as well as collective actions. As a result of covering them, just like symptoms, with a notional web worked out by Freud and Lacan, the very phenomena reveal a fundamental political basis whose discovery allows for a better understanding of the nature and reasons of the phenomena accompanying us in a local life, such as alienation, panopticism or street-art. The appropriateness of these phenomena can be understood, as I try to show, analysing this Benjamin’s dream, dreamt by a contemporary town, a dream about the community, that can be read as utopia. Accepting this utopia as salutary or damned is a fundamentally political gesture.