Postmodern Space

Postmodern Space, as Copjec deploys it in Read My Desire, names a specific spatial logic that inverts modernism's own paradox. Where modernism produces a bounded, enclosed space that nevertheless feels abyssally infinite—a finitude that opens onto the void—postmodern space is nominally open or nomadic, defined not by borders or interiority but by sheer contiguity, adjacency, surface relations. Yet this very openness yields not liberation but claustrophobia: a finite, suffocating enclosure with no outside, no depth, no abyss to fall into. The space is "everywhere" and therefore goes nowhere; it is boundless in principle but totalizing in effect.

Within the argument of the occurrence (p. 200), this spatial logic is not merely an aesthetic or architectural observation but a structural diagnosis. Copjec's theoretical move situates postmodern space as the spatial correlate of a symbolic order that has become inoperative—where the symbolic no longer screens or mediates jouissance but instead proliferates surfaces and substitutes (ersatz defenses) that fill every gap without generating genuine lack. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that the Real erupts precisely where the symbolic fails to produce constitutive absence: when there is no bounded interior, no aphanisis, no fading of the subject into depth, there is instead the suffocating plenitude of an infinite contiguity—a world without holes, and therefore without desire.

This concept appears once, in radical-thinkers-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-verso (p. 200), within Copjec's analysis of film noir as a site where the symbolic order's failure to contain jouissance becomes visible. Postmodern Space is positioned as the spatial inverse of the modernist sublime and functions as an implicit diagnosis of what happens to subjectivity—and to the subject's relation to the drive and fantasy—when the symbolic no longer generates operative lack. It is therefore intimately connected to the cross-referenced concepts: where aphanisis names the subject's structural fading into depth (a disappearance that requires an interior, a bounded space), postmodern space forecloses precisely that interiority; the subject cannot fade because there is no depth to fade into. Where fantasy ($◇a) requires a frame—a bordered screen between the subject and the Real—postmodern space's contiguous, frameless openness collapses the very topology fantasy depends on. And where desire is sustained by a constitutive gap or lack (the remainder that language cannot fill), a space of sheer surface and adjacency threatens to saturate that gap, leaving not desire but the suffocating proximity of the drive's circuit without symbolic mediation.

The concept also resonates with Feminine Sexuality and the Femme Fatale (via the cross-referenced Noir Contract as Defense): if the femme fatale is the figure who hoards rather than screens jouissance, postmodern space is the spatial form of that hoarding—a world so thoroughly open that it becomes a trap, mirroring the fatal contract the noir hero enters. Postmodern Space thus functions in Copjec's argument as an extension and spatialization of the structural diagnosis she applies to noir's visual techniques (deep-focus, chiaroscuro) and the Gaze: these techniques attempt to reinstate depth—modernist interiority—against a cultural backdrop in which the symbolic's capacity to produce constitutive absence is already eroding toward postmodern contiguity.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 2015 (p.200)

the paradoxical logics of modernism—a bounded space is abyssally infinite—and its postmodern inversion—an open or nomadic space, defined by sheer contiguity, is claustrophobically finite

The quote's theoretical load is carried by the double chiasmus: "bounded/abyssally infinite" versus "open/claustrophobically finite." The term "sheer contiguity" is decisive — contiguity is the mode of metonymy, of the signifying chain's horizontal slide, and to define space by it alone (without metaphoric depth or interiority) is to describe a symbolic order reduced to pure surface, one that can no longer produce the aphanisis or lack on which desire and fantasy depend, and that therefore closes in on the subject rather than opening onto the abyss.