L Pohl
Biographic Data
| ID | 53603 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Pohl |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Pohl |
| SIGNATURE | POHL L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7944-301X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 147 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Love in the end times: Capital’s jouissance and subject’s anxiety
Understanding contingencies in urban future-making: Unsettled foundations and the city of emerging possibilities
Introduction to the volume
Geographical Sensemaking: Situating, Relating, and Positioning as Spatial Practices Between Self and World
In defence of maladaptation and its emancipatory promises
The eco-emancipatory project is hegemonically predicated upon the signifier of socioecological 'adaptation.' Given the importance of adaptation, maladaptation usually occupies a secondary and invariably negative role. If considered at all, maladaptations are understood as temporal (or occasionally structural) dysfunctions that interfere with the homeostatic striving of the adaptive process, thereby reducing a system's ability to effectively respo…
The world as abject: On less-than-human geographies
The impossible and its vicissitudes
In this response, I address the commentaries by Friedrich and Tups and Allahyari on my paper, ‘Geographies of the Impossible’, by engaging with their main arguments, highlighting some key commonalities, and identifying further aspects that could be considered when exploring the impossible in human geography
Apocalyptic nothingness: Lacks, Holes, and the Limits of the Geographical Imagination
What’s the matter with the unconscious
Anna Secor’s ‘Spacetimeunconscious’ offers a groundbreaking intervention into the fields of material and psychoanalytic geographies. Following Karen Barad and Jacques Lacan, she develops a concept of the unconscious that takes place within matter itself. In this commentary, I add some questions, loose ends, and fragments to the theory-building patchwork of Secor's paper
Towards a post-foundational geography: Spaces of negativity, contingency, and antagonism
The relation between politics, ontology, and space remains one of the most contested concerns in human geography, often leading to a dismissal of ontology in favor of the politicization of space. In contrast, this article mobilizes post-foundationalism to propose a political ontology of space. After reviewing geographers’ engagements with politics, post-politics and the political, the article demonstrates how a post-foundational geography radical…
Geographies of the impossible
In this commentary, I trace the potential of ‘the impossible’ as a spatio-temporal category for geographical research. I proceed from the assumption that the impossible takes on an ever more prominent role in the contemporary zeitgeist, especially in light of current crisis dynamics, such as pandemics, climate change, or the threat of nuclear warfare. When the impossible ‘takes place’, it receives a geography, or means the end of geography. Geogr…
Enjoying climate change: Jouissance as a political factor
In this paper, we explore this dissonance between knowing and acting that produces the current climate deadlock by focusing on ‘enjoyment’ as a political factor. The enjoyment that infuses the climate change consensus and climate activism stands as an avatar for the wider impasse that characterizes most attempts to inflect the trajectory of the future away from ‘accumulation for accumulation sake’ and its associated socio-ecological catastrophe. …
Geopolitical Caesuras as Time-Space-Anchors of Ontological (In)security: The Case of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
The paper reviews the concept of ontological (in)security as an analytical tool to shed light on (dis)continuous narratives of selfhood engendered by geopolitics. It contributes to a growing body of empirically grounded research by addressing the necessity of a multi-dimensional understanding of individuals’ senses of ontological (in)security. The paper is based on qualitative research conducted in Berlin with participants of various age groups a…
Imaginäre Naturverhältnisse: Psychoanalytische Einsichten zur Herstellung ontologischer Sicherheit in Berlin, Vancouver und Singapur
A central diagnosis driving research around social relations of nature is the thesis of the “end of nature”. In an era marked by climate change and global warming, the image of nature as a pristine and stable foundation of human existence seems outdated. In light of this, recent scholarship demonstrates how environmental changes and conflicts increasingly affect people's daily lives and present significant threats to psychic well-being. In contra…
The love of nature: Imaginary environments and the production of ontological security in postnatural times
The existence of nature is vehemently called into question in the Anthropocene. The standard image of nature as a pristine, harmonious, and stable background no longer holds, especially as ecological changes increasingly penetrate the collective consciousness. Consequently, there has been growing interest in the psychological effects of this end of nature. A recent wave of scholarship shows how climate change and the Anthropocene more generally a…
The empty city: Covid-19 and the apocalyptic imagination
The year 2020 was accompanied by a new apocalyptic zeitgeist. After the COVID-19 pandemic shattered lifeworlds in many societies around the world, it seemed easy to imagine it to be the end of the world. No image was more evocative of this moment than that of the empty city. Due to the various lockdowns implemented in numerous countries, images of empty cities spread across the media. This paper investigates this image by emphasising the politica…
Need for shelter, demand for housing, desire for home: A psychoanalytic reading of home-making in Vancouver
Home is often dually conceptualized as a physical space of living and a psycho-social place of belonging. To engage with this dual nature of home, housing scholars refer to the concept of ontological security to understand how different forms of housing affect subjective well-being. This paper extends the scope of this research. Developing a framework inspired by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we aim to understand what kind of psycho-spatial ar…
Decentering the Subject, Psychoanalytically: Researching Imaginary Spacings through Image-Based Interviews
Since the more-than-human turn, geographers have increasingly called for a decentering of the human subject by breaking away from a classically modern understanding of subjectivity and by treating humans as one of many players. In this article, we offer an alternative way of decentering the subject by following the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Far from being subject-centered, psychoanalysis aims to understand the subject as a radically decentered…
Imaginationen der Globalisierung
What does not work in the world’: The specter of Lacan in critical political thought
This paper engages centrally with the political impotence of much of critical theory today and suggests how a Lacanian-inflected perspective may offer a possible way out of the present intellectual and political deadlock. Lacanian thought has been central to many post-foundational theorizations of the political, yet the radical implications of a Lacanian-inflected reading of the political remain largely unexplored. Our prime objective is to demon…
Ruins as pieces of the Real: Images of a post-apocalyptic present
Aura of decay: Fetishising ruins with Benjamin and Lacan
In recent years, geographers and related social scientists have worked intensively against the fetishisation of ruins. The ruin fetish is widely considered as being problematic, because it does not allow us to face the complex reality of processes of ruination and instead turns the ruin into an object with a fixed meaning and transcendental value. This paper supplements this current state of research via the fetish concepts of Walter Benjamin and…
The sublime object of Detroit
If there is one object that characterizes the rising interest of human geographers to study the ruins of the recent past, it is the Michigan Central Station in Detroit. While no city has more often been used as a blueprint for contemporary urban decline than Detroit, its ruined train station has become the global symbol for 'ruin porn'. Ruin porn is often criticized for stimulating the viewer's imagination instead of taking into account what 'rea…
Object-disoriented geographies: The Ghost Tower of Bangkok and the topology of anxiety
There is a broad consensus that psychoanalytic theory cannot offer an account to further engage with the ontological turn toward the object that human sciences face today. In particular, the structuralist side of psychoanalysis, most prominently promoted by Jacques Lacan, is supposed to be unable to grasp an object independently from the subject. Against this background, it is no surprise that 'object-oriented' geographers ignore psychoanalytic t…
Ruins of Gaia: Towards a Feminine Ontology of the Anthropocene
The current epoch is often described by cultural theorists as facing an ontological turn with regard to the question of nature. In the Anthropocene, 'Mother Nature' makes space for 'Gaia', a nature that is inseparably related to culture. In turn, Gaia has vehemently been criticized as a harmonious figure of whole-ism. Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework, this paper traces the shift from Nature to Gaia through Jacques Lacan's 'formulas of sexuati…
Enjoying climate change: Jouissance as a political factor
In this paper, we explore this dissonance between knowing and acting that produces the current climate deadlock by focusing on ‘enjoyment’ as a political factor. The enjoyment that infuses the climate change consensus and climate activism stands as an avatar for the wider impasse that characterizes most attempts to inflect the trajectory of the future away from ‘accumulation for accumulation sake’ and its associated socio-ecological catastrophe. …
Towards a post-foundational geography: Spaces of negativity, contingency, and antagonism
The relation between politics, ontology, and space remains one of the most contested concerns in human geography, often leading to a dismissal of ontology in favor of the politicization of space. In contrast, this article mobilizes post-foundationalism to propose a political ontology of space. After reviewing geographers’ engagements with politics, post-politics and the political, the article demonstrates how a post-foundational geography radical…
Ruins of Gaia: Towards a Feminine Ontology of the Anthropocene
The current epoch is often described by cultural theorists as facing an ontological turn with regard to the question of nature. In the Anthropocene, 'Mother Nature' makes space for 'Gaia', a nature that is inseparably related to culture. In turn, Gaia has vehemently been criticized as a harmonious figure of whole-ism. Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework, this paper traces the shift from Nature to Gaia through Jacques Lacan's 'formulas of sexuati…
Geographies of the impossible
In this commentary, I trace the potential of ‘the impossible’ as a spatio-temporal category for geographical research. I proceed from the assumption that the impossible takes on an ever more prominent role in the contemporary zeitgeist, especially in light of current crisis dynamics, such as pandemics, climate change, or the threat of nuclear warfare. When the impossible ‘takes place’, it receives a geography, or means the end of geography. Geogr…
Ruins as pieces of the Real: Images of a post-apocalyptic present
Aura of decay: Fetishising ruins with Benjamin and Lacan
In recent years, geographers and related social scientists have worked intensively against the fetishisation of ruins. The ruin fetish is widely considered as being problematic, because it does not allow us to face the complex reality of processes of ruination and instead turns the ruin into an object with a fixed meaning and transcendental value. This paper supplements this current state of research via the fetish concepts of Walter Benjamin and…
Object-disoriented geographies: The Ghost Tower of Bangkok and the topology of anxiety
There is a broad consensus that psychoanalytic theory cannot offer an account to further engage with the ontological turn toward the object that human sciences face today. In particular, the structuralist side of psychoanalysis, most prominently promoted by Jacques Lacan, is supposed to be unable to grasp an object independently from the subject. Against this background, it is no surprise that 'object-oriented' geographers ignore psychoanalytic t…
Need for shelter, demand for housing, desire for home: A psychoanalytic reading of home-making in Vancouver
Home is often dually conceptualized as a physical space of living and a psycho-social place of belonging. To engage with this dual nature of home, housing scholars refer to the concept of ontological security to understand how different forms of housing affect subjective well-being. This paper extends the scope of this research. Developing a framework inspired by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we aim to understand what kind of psycho-spatial ar…
The sublime object of Detroit
If there is one object that characterizes the rising interest of human geographers to study the ruins of the recent past, it is the Michigan Central Station in Detroit. While no city has more often been used as a blueprint for contemporary urban decline than Detroit, its ruined train station has become the global symbol for 'ruin porn'. Ruin porn is often criticized for stimulating the viewer's imagination instead of taking into account what 'rea…
Social protest and its policing in the “heart of the European crisis regime: The case of Blockupy in Frankfurt, Germany
Decentering the Subject, Psychoanalytically: Researching Imaginary Spacings through Image-Based Interviews
Since the more-than-human turn, geographers have increasingly called for a decentering of the human subject by breaking away from a classically modern understanding of subjectivity and by treating humans as one of many players. In this article, we offer an alternative way of decentering the subject by following the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Far from being subject-centered, psychoanalysis aims to understand the subject as a radically decentered…
What does not work in the world’: The specter of Lacan in critical political thought
This paper engages centrally with the political impotence of much of critical theory today and suggests how a Lacanian-inflected perspective may offer a possible way out of the present intellectual and political deadlock. Lacanian thought has been central to many post-foundational theorizations of the political, yet the radical implications of a Lacanian-inflected reading of the political remain largely unexplored. Our prime objective is to demon…
Geopolitical Caesuras as Time-Space-Anchors of Ontological (In)security: The Case of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
The paper reviews the concept of ontological (in)security as an analytical tool to shed light on (dis)continuous narratives of selfhood engendered by geopolitics. It contributes to a growing body of empirically grounded research by addressing the necessity of a multi-dimensional understanding of individuals’ senses of ontological (in)security. The paper is based on qualitative research conducted in Berlin with participants of various age groups a…
Apocalyptic nothingness: Lacks, Holes, and the Limits of the Geographical Imagination
The empty city: Covid-19 and the apocalyptic imagination
The year 2020 was accompanied by a new apocalyptic zeitgeist. After the COVID-19 pandemic shattered lifeworlds in many societies around the world, it seemed easy to imagine it to be the end of the world. No image was more evocative of this moment than that of the empty city. Due to the various lockdowns implemented in numerous countries, images of empty cities spread across the media. This paper investigates this image by emphasising the politica…
The love of nature: Imaginary environments and the production of ontological security in postnatural times
The existence of nature is vehemently called into question in the Anthropocene. The standard image of nature as a pristine, harmonious, and stable background no longer holds, especially as ecological changes increasingly penetrate the collective consciousness. Consequently, there has been growing interest in the psychological effects of this end of nature. A recent wave of scholarship shows how climate change and the Anthropocene more generally a…
In defence of maladaptation and its emancipatory promises
The eco-emancipatory project is hegemonically predicated upon the signifier of socioecological 'adaptation.' Given the importance of adaptation, maladaptation usually occupies a secondary and invariably negative role. If considered at all, maladaptations are understood as temporal (or occasionally structural) dysfunctions that interfere with the homeostatic striving of the adaptive process, thereby reducing a system's ability to effectively respo…
The world as abject: On less-than-human geographies
What’s the matter with the unconscious
Anna Secor’s ‘Spacetimeunconscious’ offers a groundbreaking intervention into the fields of material and psychoanalytic geographies. Following Karen Barad and Jacques Lacan, she develops a concept of the unconscious that takes place within matter itself. In this commentary, I add some questions, loose ends, and fragments to the theory-building patchwork of Secor's paper
Social protest and its policing in the “heart of the European crisis regime: The case of Blockupy in Frankfurt, Germany
Imaginary politics of the branded city
This chapter analyses the city Zwickau in Germany as a subject of mediated stigmatisation and develops a critical understanding for ways of dealing with right-wing terrorism and extremism through local identities, following psychoanalytic theories. Assuming that imaginary politics usually seek to draw very clear, simple and memorable portraits of the city, the chapter focuses on the details of the city's image. According to imaginary politics, it…
Object-disoriented geographies: The Ghost Tower of Bangkok and the topology of anxiety
There is a broad consensus that psychoanalytic theory cannot offer an account to further engage with the ontological turn toward the object that human sciences face today. In particular, the structuralist side of psychoanalysis, most prominently promoted by Jacques Lacan, is supposed to be unable to grasp an object independently from the subject. Against this background, it is no surprise that 'object-oriented' geographers ignore psychoanalytic t…
Ruins of Gaia: Towards a Feminine Ontology of the Anthropocene
The current epoch is often described by cultural theorists as facing an ontological turn with regard to the question of nature. In the Anthropocene, 'Mother Nature' makes space for 'Gaia', a nature that is inseparably related to culture. In turn, Gaia has vehemently been criticized as a harmonious figure of whole-ism. Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework, this paper traces the shift from Nature to Gaia through Jacques Lacan's 'formulas of sexuati…
Imaginationen der Globalisierung
What does not work in the world’: The specter of Lacan in critical political thought
This paper engages centrally with the political impotence of much of critical theory today and suggests how a Lacanian-inflected perspective may offer a possible way out of the present intellectual and political deadlock. Lacanian thought has been central to many post-foundational theorizations of the political, yet the radical implications of a Lacanian-inflected reading of the political remain largely unexplored. Our prime objective is to demon…
Ruins as pieces of the Real: Images of a post-apocalyptic present
Aura of decay: Fetishising ruins with Benjamin and Lacan
In recent years, geographers and related social scientists have worked intensively against the fetishisation of ruins. The ruin fetish is widely considered as being problematic, because it does not allow us to face the complex reality of processes of ruination and instead turns the ruin into an object with a fixed meaning and transcendental value. This paper supplements this current state of research via the fetish concepts of Walter Benjamin and…
The sublime object of Detroit
If there is one object that characterizes the rising interest of human geographers to study the ruins of the recent past, it is the Michigan Central Station in Detroit. While no city has more often been used as a blueprint for contemporary urban decline than Detroit, its ruined train station has become the global symbol for 'ruin porn'. Ruin porn is often criticized for stimulating the viewer's imagination instead of taking into account what 'rea…
Imaginäre Naturverhältnisse: Psychoanalytische Einsichten zur Herstellung ontologischer Sicherheit in Berlin, Vancouver und Singapur
A central diagnosis driving research around social relations of nature is the thesis of the “end of nature”. In an era marked by climate change and global warming, the image of nature as a pristine and stable foundation of human existence seems outdated. In light of this, recent scholarship demonstrates how environmental changes and conflicts increasingly affect people's daily lives and present significant threats to psychic well-being. In contra…
The love of nature: Imaginary environments and the production of ontological security in postnatural times
The existence of nature is vehemently called into question in the Anthropocene. The standard image of nature as a pristine, harmonious, and stable background no longer holds, especially as ecological changes increasingly penetrate the collective consciousness. Consequently, there has been growing interest in the psychological effects of this end of nature. A recent wave of scholarship shows how climate change and the Anthropocene more generally a…
The empty city: Covid-19 and the apocalyptic imagination
The year 2020 was accompanied by a new apocalyptic zeitgeist. After the COVID-19 pandemic shattered lifeworlds in many societies around the world, it seemed easy to imagine it to be the end of the world. No image was more evocative of this moment than that of the empty city. Due to the various lockdowns implemented in numerous countries, images of empty cities spread across the media. This paper investigates this image by emphasising the politica…
Need for shelter, demand for housing, desire for home: A psychoanalytic reading of home-making in Vancouver
Home is often dually conceptualized as a physical space of living and a psycho-social place of belonging. To engage with this dual nature of home, housing scholars refer to the concept of ontological security to understand how different forms of housing affect subjective well-being. This paper extends the scope of this research. Developing a framework inspired by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we aim to understand what kind of psycho-spatial ar…
Decentering the Subject, Psychoanalytically: Researching Imaginary Spacings through Image-Based Interviews
Since the more-than-human turn, geographers have increasingly called for a decentering of the human subject by breaking away from a classically modern understanding of subjectivity and by treating humans as one of many players. In this article, we offer an alternative way of decentering the subject by following the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Far from being subject-centered, psychoanalysis aims to understand the subject as a radically decentered…
What’s the matter with the unconscious
Anna Secor’s ‘Spacetimeunconscious’ offers a groundbreaking intervention into the fields of material and psychoanalytic geographies. Following Karen Barad and Jacques Lacan, she develops a concept of the unconscious that takes place within matter itself. In this commentary, I add some questions, loose ends, and fragments to the theory-building patchwork of Secor's paper
Towards a post-foundational geography: Spaces of negativity, contingency, and antagonism
The relation between politics, ontology, and space remains one of the most contested concerns in human geography, often leading to a dismissal of ontology in favor of the politicization of space. In contrast, this article mobilizes post-foundationalism to propose a political ontology of space. After reviewing geographers’ engagements with politics, post-politics and the political, the article demonstrates how a post-foundational geography radical…
Geographies of the impossible
In this commentary, I trace the potential of ‘the impossible’ as a spatio-temporal category for geographical research. I proceed from the assumption that the impossible takes on an ever more prominent role in the contemporary zeitgeist, especially in light of current crisis dynamics, such as pandemics, climate change, or the threat of nuclear warfare. When the impossible ‘takes place’, it receives a geography, or means the end of geography. Geogr…
Enjoying climate change: Jouissance as a political factor
In this paper, we explore this dissonance between knowing and acting that produces the current climate deadlock by focusing on ‘enjoyment’ as a political factor. The enjoyment that infuses the climate change consensus and climate activism stands as an avatar for the wider impasse that characterizes most attempts to inflect the trajectory of the future away from ‘accumulation for accumulation sake’ and its associated socio-ecological catastrophe. …
Geopolitical Caesuras as Time-Space-Anchors of Ontological (In)security: The Case of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
The paper reviews the concept of ontological (in)security as an analytical tool to shed light on (dis)continuous narratives of selfhood engendered by geopolitics. It contributes to a growing body of empirically grounded research by addressing the necessity of a multi-dimensional understanding of individuals’ senses of ontological (in)security. The paper is based on qualitative research conducted in Berlin with participants of various age groups a…
The world as abject: On less-than-human geographies
The impossible and its vicissitudes
In this response, I address the commentaries by Friedrich and Tups and Allahyari on my paper, ‘Geographies of the Impossible’, by engaging with their main arguments, highlighting some key commonalities, and identifying further aspects that could be considered when exploring the impossible in human geography
Apocalyptic nothingness: Lacks, Holes, and the Limits of the Geographical Imagination
Understanding contingencies in urban future-making: Unsettled foundations and the city of emerging possibilities
Introduction to the volume
Geographical Sensemaking: Situating, Relating, and Positioning as Spatial Practices Between Self and World
Sociology (19 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Psychoanalysis (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Law (10 works)