(2023/work in progress)

Parisian parks can be seen as modern attempts to recreate an Edenic utopia—an idealized, curated version of nature that reflects humanity’s longing for harmony, beauty, and escape from the chaos of urban or everyday life. However, their artificiality and layered meanings also expose the fragility and contradictions inherent in these recreations.

The Park presents itself as a space of controlled enjoyment (jouissance), where nature is tamed and ordered, yet its very existence betrays a deeper anxiety: the impossibility of returning to a true state of nature. The artificial Eden is haunted by its lack, by the Real of raw nature that it seeks to repress. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the Park functions as a symbolic structure designed to mediate desire and repression. It is a liminal space, where the subject can temporarily suspend the demands of the urban superego and indulge in a fantasy of return to the maternal embrace of nature. Yet this fantasy is always already ruptured. The meticulously arranged landscapes, the manicured lawns, the planned vistas—all serve to mask the abyss beneath, the Lacanian Real that threatens to emerge and destroy everything.

This explains why parks, despite their idyllic function, so often become sites of transgression: cemeteries, war memorials, prostitutes, and drug addicts coexist with families, lovers, and tourists. The obscene seeps through the cracks of the idealized Symbolic order. This duality—the attempt to create a utopia that inevitably exposes its lack—mirrors the Freudian Unheimlich (the uncanny). The Park is both familiar and strange, a comforting imitation of nature that also signals its artifice.

When celebrated as symbols of cultural achievement, parks can easily veer into kitsch—mere representations of idealized nature or civic pride, disconnected from any profound or unmediated experience. Yet, precisely in their failure to sustain the illusion of harmony, they reveal the traumatic excess that cannot be fully contained by the Symbolic order.