Uneasiness in culture, or negotiating the sublime distances towards the big Other

This paper engages Slavoj Žižek's thesis that people's integration into a dominant culture requires successfully negotiating certain “distances” towards what Jacques Lacan called the “big Other,” that is, a nonexistent locus that subtly guides symbolic rules, conventions, and mandates. My main goal here is to illustrate how Žižek's conceptualizations of distance and the big Other can further our geographical theorizations of culture, especially in terms of Sigmund Freud's notion of the “uneasiness in culture.” I explore Žižek's identification of three modes of distanciation towards the big Other—“inherent transgression”, “empty gesture,” and “fetishistic disavowal,” which abound in uneasiness because they are sublime, that is, demarcated by virtuality and unfathomability. I also discuss how the demise of the big Other's authority has produced new spaces of cultural uneasiness that can be usefully understood in terms of increased interactions between everyday microcultures.