Fuss, Diana & Sanders, Joel

Bio Sketch

Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders are the American scholar-and-architect pair who co-authored "Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office" (1996). Diana Fuss is a literary theorist of feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis and interiority: emeritus Louis W. Fairchild Class of '24 Professor of English at Princeton University (PhD in English and Semiotics, Brown University; Princeton faculty from 1988), author of Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (1989), Identification Papers (1995) and The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them (2004, MLA James Russell Lowell Prize), editor of Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (1991) and Human, All Too Human (1996). Joel Sanders is a New York architect, founder-principal of Joel Sanders Architect (JSA), Professor and Director of Post-Professional Studies at Yale School of Architecture, editor of Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (1996) and Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture (2005) — his practice and writings "explored the complex relationship between culture and social space, looking at the impact that evolving cultural forces (such as gender identity and the body, technology and new media, and the nature/culture dualism) have on the designed environment" (JSA/STALLED! bio); JSA projects are held in the collections of MoMA, SFMOMA and the Art Institute of Chicago, and Sanders is a founding member of STALLED! (gender-inclusive public restrooms, with Susan Stryker and Terry Kogan). Fuss and Sanders have collaborated repeatedly — most substantially in An Aesthetic Headache: Notes from the Museum Bench (Yale University Press, 2018) on museum architecture.

Key Works

*Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office* (1996) — the architectural reading of Freud's consulting room: "how vision, power and gender structure this scene of psychoanalysis"; first published in Sanders's Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), reprinted in Intimus (2006, pp. 117–124).
Fuss: Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (1989) — feminist theory and essentialism. (Not yet ingested.)
Fuss: Identification Papers (1995) — psychoanalytic theories of identification (Freud, Laplanche, Butler). (Not yet ingested.)
Fuss: The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them (2004) — the writer's room as the shaper of vision; MLA James Russell Lowell Prize. (Not yet ingested.)
Fuss: Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy (2013) — elegy and modern poetry. (Not yet ingested.)
Fuss (ed.): Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (1991) — the queer-theory anthology of which Stud's climate was part. (Not yet ingested.)
Sanders (ed.): Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (1996) — the anthology that also carries Edelman's "Men's Room"; the wiki's second Stud source after this one. (Excerpt via Fuss & Sanders 2006.)
Sanders (ed.): Groundwork: Between Landscape Architecture (2005) — landscape and architecture's middle ground. (Not yet ingested.)
Fuss & Sanders: An Aesthetic Headache: Notes from the Museum Bench (2018) — the museum-bench collaboration on museum architecture and the viewing body. (Not yet ingested.)
Sanders (ed.): Stud — "Berggasse 19" as cited authority: Charles Rice's interior historiography cites the essay in full ("Joel Sanders and Diana Fuss, 'Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office,' Stud… pp. 112–39," note 9) for the claim that Freud's collection made his consulting rooms "into a domestic interior" and provided "the setting for the scene of transference" — the essay functioning as the Berggasse scholarship's canonical reference in the interior-historiography literature (Rice 2004/2006).

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with these authors that have pages in this wiki:

mirror — the mirror-on-window that "redirects the gaze inward"; the mirrored interior's three regimes
mirror-stage — Lacan's stage built into a room: the "architectonics of the Freudian subject"
the-double — the mirror image as death mask and spectral double; the Etruscan mirror's "window onto immortality"
transference — the doctor-patient relation staged as a spatial transaction of furniture, axes and light
castration-anxiety — "the sight of seeing oneself seeing"; self-reflection petrifies
psychoanalysis — Freud's Standard Edition read architecturally (Papers on Technique, "The 'Uncanny'", "Medusa's Head", the Schreber case)
uncanny — the mirror world as "the most inhuman of possible worlds, the most unheimlich"
gaze — the "multitude of gazes"; the externalized gaze "relayed back upon itself"
panopticon — the "reverse panopticon": "power… exercised from the margins"
masculinity — the Stud frame: Freud's bust, the "optical erection" and its castration price

Relevance to the Core Research

Fuss and Sanders supply the wiki's psychoanalytic interior at its origin-point: not a building theorized by psychoanalysis but the room where psychoanalysis was invented, read as an apparatus of vision, power and gender. Their "reverse panopticon" adds the power-and-space debate's third geometry of the gaze (centered vulnerability, marginal mastery), their mirror-on-window adds a new register to the window/mirror media problem (truth-and-illusion, inside-outside-dialectic), and their "architectonics of the Freudian subject" gives the interiority cluster its long-awaited psychoanalytic register — the innerness given from outside as a statue, bust or death mask. As a pair they bridge the wiki's masculinity/queer-theory cluster (the Stud anthology, of which Edelman's Men's Room is the sibling essay) and the interior-design-theory cluster (the Intimus reprint), and their museum-bench collaboration makes them a natural node for the wiki's museum pages.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from these authors' work:

Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (1996/2006)