Adam’s House on Earth: Architectural and Libidinal Tensions in Lars von Trier’s The House That Jack Built

Drawing on the seminar on Anxiety, this chapter highlights Lacan’s psycho-tectonic thinking, and how Lacanian psychoanalysis and architecture enrich one another as parallel approaches to contemporary ontology. Lars von Trier’s horror film The House That Jack Built, whose protagonist is a serial killer, cynical thinker and failed architect, is used as an example. The chapter attempts three approximations between Lacanian psychoanalysis and architecture. The first one focuses on movement and change of perspective as presented by Lacan in the successive rotations of the Moebius strip and the mirrors of the schema of vision. I ask: what appears as we move from one perspective to the next? What happens when architecture is enfolded into the psychoanalytic movement of space and time? The second approximation concerns the transition from cosmos to scene. In the seminar on Anxiety, Lacan argues that the wider cosmos, architecture in our case, can only come into being within a frame or a stage, both operating according to the laws of the signifier. The third approximation focuses on the function of the primitive in architecture, as represented by the primitive hut, a ‘tame’ elemental building to which Jack’s house stands as the nightmarish opposite. I argue that an additional dimension of the primitive should be added today, the primitive and ever-expanding accumulation which lies at the heart of capitalism and subjectivity, and stops only at points of impossible exchange.