Jo Harper’s Notes from the EU’s Eastern Edge: How Migrants Were Weaponized on the Polish–Belarusian Border and Out of the Loop initially look as if they belong on different shelves. The first is an interdisciplinary political study of migration, borders, memory and European identity, grounded in reporting and fieldwork along Poland’s frontier with Belarus. The second is an unruly, comic and frequently uncomfortable work of memoir, autofiction and psychoanalytic self-interrogation, populated by a divided protagonist, his younger self, an increasingly mutinous Editor and, eventually, Jacques Lacan himself.
One belongs recognisably to border studies, political sociology, memory studies and critical international relations. The other is harder to shelve: part autofiction, part confessional literature, part comic novel, part psychoanalytic case history written by the patient while repeatedly interrupting the analyst.
They can be read separately. They probably should be read together.
Taken as a pair, they amount to a single work conducted at two different scales. Notes from the EU’s Eastern Edge asks what political communities do with what they cannot absorb. Out of the Loop asks the same question of a person. One examines walls, migrants, collective memory, sovereignty and national fantasy. The other examines lovers, parents, alcohol, countries, work and the stories through which an individual tries to keep himself coherent.
Both are ultimately books about borders.
The political border.
The skin.
The surface.
The story we tell about what lies on either side.
And the things that keep coming through anyway.
The political unconscious of the border
Notes from the EU’s Eastern Edge begins with the crisis on the Polish-Belarusian frontier after 2021 but refuses to remain there. Its underlying argument is that borders are never merely administrative lines. They are psychic and symbolic infrastructures: places at which societies stage fears about contamination, sovereignty, recognition and belonging.
This places the book within an established critical literature on securitisation and migration, but Harper adds something less usual: a sustained Lacanian vocabulary for understanding why political structures continue to repeat practices even when their contradictions are obvious.
The book’s concluding theoretical architecture is explicit. Law, budgets, security doctrines and official languages belong to the Symbolic order; media images, national self-presentations and fantasies of coherence operate through the Imaginary; war, drowning, bodily exposure and systemic contradiction erupt as the Real. The border consequently functions “less as a line than as a screen”, a place onto which internal anxieties are projected and from which recognition is demanded. Walls and military installations are simultaneously material objects and props in an imagined drama of sovereign completeness.
That argument matters because it shifts the central question.
Instead of asking only whether a border policy “works”, Harper asks what else it is doing.
Why must the wall be seen? Why must toughness repeatedly be announced? Why must the threatening outsider continually be reproduced? Why does the political community require the scene?
The book is strongest when these theoretical questions remain attached to bodies and places. In one of its most striking passages, Harper reads representations of Warsaw’s sewers in Claude Lanzmann and Agnieszka Holland as an “archeology of surfaces”. The ordinary city above becomes a kind of skin: cafés operate, trams move, traffic continues, while immediately underneath is an intestinal world containing what civilisation has pushed from sight. The sewer becomes a Lacanian Real, not because it is somehow more authentic than the street above, but because it contains something the symbolic order cannot successfully metabolise. The point at which the survivor emerges through a manhole is therefore not simply a crossing. It is a wound in the surface.
This preoccupation with skin, surface and what lies beneath runs throughout the book.
Borders are skin. National memory is skin. The rhetoric of civilisation is skin.
But skin is not false. It is necessary. Human beings and political communities require boundaries and categories. The problem begins when the surface is asked to prove that nothing contradictory exists beneath it.
That is where fantasy enters.
For Harper, fantasy is not synonymous with delusion. It is an organising structure that makes contradiction bearable. Poland can imagine itself simultaneously as victim, defender, European frontier and guardian of civilisation because these positions organise otherwise incompatible historical memories. Europe can proclaim universal humanitarian values while maintaining zones of exception at its edges because the contradiction is displaced geographically. The migrant becomes particularly useful in this structure: body, signifier, threat, victim and mirror.
The result is repetition.
One of the book’s recurrent concepts is repetition compulsion: attempts to settle an unresolved symbolic conflict instead reproduce it. More deterrence confirms the other side’s story of hostility. More walls require more representations of danger. More historical certainty generates further battles over memory. The alleged solution feeds the condition it is supposed to end.
This is where the academic book begins quietly approaching the personal one.
The man at the lake
Out of the Loop takes almost exactly the same machinery and applies it to a life.
Its great formal decision is to refuse the stable autobiographical “I”. Instead there is the Man. The Boy. The Editor. Lacan.
There are also grotesques, animals, politicians, football managers, ghosts and a Night Manager who seems permanently ready to check the protagonist back into some earlier version of himself.
The central landscape is a lake in Warsaw.
A real lake, the narrator repeatedly insists, precisely because almost everything around it keeps becoming metaphor.
He walks around it in rain, snow, fog and thin winter light. The lake gradually becomes analytical chamber, stage and looping structure. Even the joke announces the theoretical method: lake, lac, lack, Lacan.
This could easily have become unbearably clever. The book survives because it knows that. Indeed, much of Out of the Loop consists of the text attacking its own cleverness before the reader can.
Lacan lectures. The Editor complains. The Boy sees through both of them. The Man turns suffering into literature and is immediately accused of enjoying the performance. Insight itself becomes suspect.
At one point Lacan produces a slide bearing the words:
THE FANTASY THAT UNDERSTANDING CHANGES ANYTHING.
The Boy objects that the Man already knows about repetition, narcissism, impossible women, fathers and Poland.
“Yes,” Lacan replies.
“And he still does it?”
“Yes.”
That exchange may be the intellectual centre of the book. It also clarifies what Harper is using psychoanalysis for. Lacan is not brought in to supply a secret key that finally explains the patient. Quite the opposite. The book becomes increasingly suspicious of explanation as another defence mechanism.
The Man can explain his mother.
He can explain his father.
He can explain abandonment.
He can explain Poland.
He can explain the unavailable woman.
He can explain why he drinks.
He can even explain why he has an excessive need to explain.
And still repeat.
Knowledge is not cure.
Sometimes knowledge simply makes repetition more articulate.
That is a considerably more interesting deployment of Lacan than psychoanalysis as retrospective detective work.
Fantasy at two scales
Read together, the two books reveal that they are using the same conceptual machine.
In Notes, a nation imagines that if the border is sufficiently secure, the anxiety will disappear.
In Out of the Loop, the Man imagines that if he understands the woman sufficiently, loves her sufficiently, rescues her sufficiently, or suffers sufficiently beautifully, something missing inside him will finally be returned.
The fantasy is structurally similar.
If I do X, completeness will arrive. The border will hold. The woman will remain. Europe will recognise us. The father will approve. The job will stabilise me. The country will become home. The past will finally make sense.
Lacan’s usefulness across both texts lies precisely here. Lack cannot be permanently repaired because it is not a minor structural defect awaiting an efficient tradesman. It is constitutive. Desire moves because completion does not arrive.
Out of the Loop eventually formulates fantasy in almost brutally simple terms: if I understand her, she will love me; if I save her, I may remain; if I suffer beautifully enough, perhaps somebody will finally come.
The political equivalents are not difficult to hear.
If we build the wall, we will become sovereign. If Europe recognises our sacrifice, we will finally belong. If history acknowledges our suffering, the wound will close. If the outsider disappears, we will become whole.
Neither book says that borders, relationships, security or recognition are unreal. That would reduce psychoanalysis to adolescent relativism.
The argument is subtler. Real objects become dangerous when they are required to perform impossible psychic labour. A lover cannot complete a self. A border cannot complete a nation.
The Real has a body
Both books are at their best when theory crashes into matter.
In Notes, the Real arrives as corpses, cold, mud, forests, drowning and the physical body that refuses political abstraction.
In Out of the Loop, it arrives rather less majestically through illness, blood and a toilet.
This is deliberate.
At one point the Man’s body finally interrupts the increasingly ornate machinery of heartbreak, theory and self-narration. The Editor instinctively wants to improve the scene, make it more literary.
Lacan stops him: “The Real does not require editing.”
No symbolic explanation follows. The doctor does not ask about childhood, Poland or the impossible woman. There is simply a body which may require an operation if the behaviour continues. Sobriety subsequently removes the anaesthetic but solves nothing automatically: the marriage is still ending, work remains uncertain, desire remains desire.
Here the two books become almost mirror texts.
The political system wants to convert bodies into categories.
Migrant. Weapon. Refugee.Threat. European. Non-European.
The autobiographical subject performs a similar operation upon himself.
Lover. Victim. Englishman. Writer. Alcoholic. Father. Abandoned child. Intellectual.
Each term creates a usable surface. The Real keeps leaking through it.
The danger of beautiful explanations
Both books take substantial risks.
The academic work sometimes stretches psychoanalytic language across political phenomena whose causal explanation must also include institutions, interests, elections, economics and military strategy. Readers committed to positivist political science will object that the border does not possess a psyche and Poland cannot literally undergo analysis.
Harper largely anticipates that objection. His method is interpretive rather than predictive. The point is not to diagnose a nation as though it were an individual patient but to ask how collective fantasies become embodied in institutions, images and practices.
Out of the Loop takes an opposite but related risk.
It threatens constantly to become exactly what it criticises: a man converting every woman, parent, country and disappointment into material for the Great Interesting Self.
The book knows this too. Its internal Editor exists partly to prosecute the case. Even Lacan eventually becomes compromised. He is not allowed to remain the master theorist sitting safely outside the narrative. He too is implicated in the fantasy that loneliness can be converted into vocabulary and therefore controlled. Psychoanalysis itself becomes another possible defence against the Real.
This reflexivity saves both works from their most obvious weaknesses.
Neither permits its theoretical language to remain innocent.
One work, two skins
Read alone, Notes from the EU’s Eastern Edge is an ambitious and distinctive contribution to critical border studies, migration politics and the psychoanalytic study of nationalism and memory. Its achievement is to show how apparently material political objects—walls, fences, security programmes, films, monuments—also operate in economies of desire and recognition.
Read alone, Out of the Loop is a strange, funny, abrasive work of psychoanalytic autofiction about love, alcohol, family, belonging and repetition. It resembles memoir only until one notices that its narrator is repeatedly dismantled by his own cast.
Read together, however, the books become far more than academic study plus personal appendix.
The first examines the collective skin. The second examines the private one.
Both are concerned with what surfaces conceal and reveal, with what happens when fantasy is asked to repair loss, and with the extraordinary energy required to maintain structures that repeatedly fail to deliver the wholeness they promise.
Most importantly, neither concludes with mastery. There is no final interpretation. No perfectly secure border. No completed self. No cure in which history stops returning.
What appears instead is a more modest ethics of attention. Notice the repetition. Notice the projection. Notice what the surface is being asked to hide. Notice who is being made to carry the anxiety.
And perhaps, once the mechanism becomes visible, resist the temptation to build another wall around the wound.
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