UC Irvine

Our notions of memory are altered if space is regarded as playing as constitutive a role as time in its formation, including what I am here defining as 'the spatial unconscious'. The spatial unconscious is what enables us to see the inaugural moments of an elemental civilization (a being-with-others) in a different perspective from the one offered by a view of civilization as a 'movement' from past to present to future. This essay traces the alternative pathway for the fate of civilizations and their cities that the standpoint of a spatial unconscious offers and which can be found in a remarkable series of French writers and artists from Montaigne to Rousseau, Deleuze and Lacan and from Baudelaire to Duras and Sophie Calle.