Where's the Difference? The Heterosexualization of Alterity in Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Lacan

Abstract

It has been largely overlooked that Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space draws heavily upon Lacanian psychoanalytic accounts of the emergence of subjectivity in theorizing political relations, Lefebvre implicitly repudiates at the same time that he builds upon Lacan's distinctions between real, imaginary, and symbolic registers of subjectivity. For Lefebvre, Lacan's registers give primacy to visuality and heterosexualized familial dynamics while lived material, spatial, and political experience arc incidental to subject formation and systems of meaning Lefebvre transforms Lacan's registers by historicizing them in spatially dialectical terms, loosely replacing them with distinct forms of evolutionary spatialities which he calls natural, absolute, and abstract, In the process, he both subverts and reproduces Lacan's paternal–maternal (heterosexual) order. We hold that Lefebvrc's critique provides powerful theoretical tools for understanding how alterity and signification are always and inevitably politically and materially mediated through corporealities and ‘space’. Nonetheless, Lefebvre can only work out his spatial dialectic of history in heterosexist terms: although he usefully identifies maternal–paternal metaphors in different Western social formations over time, he fails to interrogate directly the very hetero-sexuality that gives these metaphors their relational significance and force. In short, he brings us to the brink of a nonheterosexist domain, but never enters it. In this paper then, we outline the striking parallels in the theoretical frameworks of Lefebvre and Lacan in order to illustrate how both theorists focus on gender construction as the fundamental social process through which alterity is achieved. At the same time, we unpack the underlying phallocentrism and heterosexism that sustain their versions of alterity, subjectivity, and agency, in the process showing how Lefebvre deftly undermines the apolitical stance of Lacan. In conclusion, we strive to recuperate the crucial liberatory aspects of Lefebvre's project through considering how we might go on to dislocate received versions of capitalism and sexual difference.