Listening to / reading this in fragments during breaks between meetings, it was hard to take notes… which actually suits the flow of this book (The Poetics of Space) rather well. A few points below struck me as interesting.

  1. It breaks free of the causal-analytic framework and takes the phenomenological path instead. It doesn’t ask “where does the image come from” – whether it stems from childhood trauma or the collective unconscious – but asks how the image directly strikes the reader’s imagination. This claim of “immediacy” opens up a path for the study of spatial images distinct from psychoanalysis or sociology.

  2. The case material draws broadly from many sources, spanning poets writing in French, German, and other languages (Baudelaire, Rilke, Novalis, and others), and the argument is often corroborated by Bachelard’s own early reflections on the philosophy of science – showing how his scholarship bridges the rational and the sensory. Many of the individual analyses are subtle and original. Seemingly trivial spatial images like the “drawer,” the “corner,” the “bird’s nest,” once taken up one by one by Bachelard, turn out to yield profound insights about intimacy and the sense of shelter – a real testament to the sharpness of his questions.

Some shortcomings, as I see them.

  1. Almost everything is drawn from the experience of the middle-class house – attics, cellars, country cottages – spaces that themselves carry the imprint of a particular historical stage and a particular class’s way of living. To build an argument about “humanity’s universal spatial imagination” on this basis risks defaulting a parochial experience of dwelling into a universal structure, a flaw common to quite a few works of phenomenology.

  2. “Reverberation” and “resonance,” when it comes down to it, merely describe the fact that “this image really did move us,” without going further to explain “why this particular image, and not some other, moved us.” This remains fundamentally descriptive rather than explanatory – less a theory than an elegant naming of the reading experience, and perhaps less innovative than it appears on the surface.

Of course, this is a work from Bachelard’s later years, and its methodological choices reflect a consistent stance of his own – no need to be too harsh about it.