Agoraphobia, Sartre, and the Spatiality of the Look

To what extent is our experience of spatiality affected by our experience of others? Such is the question I will be exploring in this paper. I will do so via the mood of agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is often thought of as a phobia involving spatiality, especially in relation the space of the home. In this paper, I will argue that the issue of spatiality cannot be understood without reference to intersubjectivity. I will pursue this claim with a first-person analysis of agoraphobia. To achieve this, I will turn to Sartre’s account of the look. Sartre’s account of intersubjectivity is helpful in allowing us to recognise both the intersubjective structure of spatiality and the embodiment. For Sartre, the look of the other carries with it a destabilising affect. In it, a conflict takes place between two of more selves, each of whom struggle to regain control over their environmental and bodily bearings, as he puts it: “The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the centrality which I am simultaneously effecting” (255). To understand this relation between decentralization and centralization, I turn to the phenomenology of agoraphobia, and especially to the experience of walking. My claim is that the agoraphobic experience getting from A to B is never simply a question of spatial relations, but is always informed by the expression of our total subjectivity and our relation with the other’s look. By way of conclusion, I will propose the following formulation: our experience of others is mediated by space and our experience of space is mediated by the look of the other, such that we cannot speak about intersubjectivity without also speaking about interspatiality.