Erotic Zones, Utopian Images

Paul Carter, Erotic Zones, Utopian Images. The Miller Atlas (c.1519) by cartographers Lope Homem and Pedro Reinel is remarkable for its representation of islands. The kaleidoscopic profusion and indifference to geographical fact have puzzled commentators. This article proposes that the islands are metaphors as such, notations of movement forms that are simultaneously mental and environmental; mobilizing the imagination, they represent commerce in its broadest sense exchange through the negotiation of exchange rates. In an imperial context, they translate geography into choreography. Drawing on Raul Ruizs discussion of an episode in the life of Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault (best known as Jacques Lacans teacher), it is suggested that the islands are hallucinatory, their virtual or utopian images expressing an Eros that easily elides visualization with an act of psychological or political enslavement. As drawings of new realities, the swarming shoals of the Homem/Reinel chart offer a complex hieroglyph of the performances, psychic and environmental, through which the imperialising spirit first fantasises the world, then takes hold it.