Social Exclusion and Non-Places: From Urban Spaces to the Drive

This article presents a continuation of a study of homelessness. The hypothesis of an “urban Other” is examined on three levels: literary, clinical and anthropological. Each time, we pay attention to the function of a hole in space (looking at the literary notion of “blank spaces,” Lacan’s discussion of the effacement of the trait, and the anthropological concept of “non-places”), gradually tracing the instinctual logic at the heart of what could be called “the urban Other”.