Lacan and Anish Kapoor's Topology of the Body
Abe Geldhof
Lacan was always interested in topology, because he found in this discipline three-dimensional models for thinking about the difficult question of the bodily effects of language. Nevertheless, his focus was not always the same. As the questions that preoccupied him changed over the years, he used different figures. In his Seminar IX (1961-1962) he used the torus to explain how desire is shaped by a double lack in the confrontation between need and demand. In his Seminar X (1962-1963) he used the Möbius strip to grasp how an extracted object supports the framework of the subject’s phantasmatic reality. And later, in his study of Lol V. Stein (1965), he took the crosscap to situate the object a, as a bodily point that cannot be reflected in the mirror, and that is necessary as a support for the body image:a → i(a).
This unnamable point where inside and outside invert is exactly the point that Anish Kapoor’s art challenges. This very interesting contemporary artist examines the same Lacanian theme of the topology of the body in abstract terms. Consider for example his work Descent into limbo, where he created the blackest hole as possible. “It reads not like a hole in the ground, but like a black carpet sitting on the floor. It is not an empty dark space, but a space full of darkness,”[1] he said. Or consider My Body Your Body where the border between inside and outside becomes problematic. “I’m endlessly obsessed with the question of the interior,” he said.[2] Or: “I'm not interested in self reference, I couldn’t imagine anything more horrible.”[3] His work is not about the ego, but about the impact of language on the body. Indeed, an analysis taken far enough – Anish Kapoor doesn’t make any secret of his own 25-year analysis – can create a distance from what has been one’s horror and can to a certain extent answer the question of how the body is shaped by language.
Revised by Joanne Conway