ABSTRACT
A central thesis comes out of Buck-Morss’s analysis that culminates in a definition of phantasmagoria important for our argument: Phantasmagoria is inevitably implicated in effects of intoxication or anaesthetization . In view of this, her essay helps illuminate aspects of phantasmagoria that were touched upon in previous chapters. They relate to the problem of mediation of technology in the organization of the human sensorium as itself the medium through which the subject opens itself to external reality. In what follows, we analyze the consequences of this mediation for the subject, whose constitution is conditioned by the stimuli arising from the modern city. At the center of this dynamic is a theory of experience that is directly related to a theory of the city conceived – to reiterate – on the model of Lacan’s famous thesis of the ‘unconscious structured like a language,’ according to which the city is ‘structured like a phantasmagoria.’
