Secondary Virtuality, the Anamorphosis of Projective Geometry

Abstract

It is tempting to construct theory about the Other using binary oppositions. Lacanian psychoanalysis avoids this by stressing the geometry of the Borromeo knot, whose three rings embody both sequentiality and self-intersection. This essay organizes Lacan’s topological options around a “secondary virtuality” by (1) considering Mladen Dolar’s expanded account of anamorphosis, (2) connecting the architectural void to the problem of non-enclosure of the standard figures of projective geometry immersion – the Möbius band, cross-cap, and Klein bottle - and (3) taking Pappus’s theorem, the origin of projective geometry, to the twisted and folded spaces of the uncanny, where unheimlich (“un-homely”) directly implicates architecture as an agency of topological transformation. Two examples, Chesterton’s “The Queer Feet” (1911) and the 1951 science-fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, demonstrate the continued relevance of Pappus’s idea of secondary virtuality to Lacan’s correlation of the Other and ‘extimacy’.